253 Should Your Firm Do Something New? Or More Of The Same?

Does your accounting firm need to change? Do you need to be thinking about new services, or do you just need to double down on what's working, what you're doing right now? One of many existential crises that are just part of being a firm owner. Also today, boy, did Google crap the bed this week. A massive leak of how Google search algorithms work, which probably change how we advertise what our firms do. This mean we should be less reliant on Google search. Everybody's mad at Twitter's algorithm. So people are kind of concerned about, like, is social media really the future? And is that where I should be investing? And how do we see AI impacting all of this? Some stuff I've gathered from some recent, like, AI talks at conferences. Come on in. It's Q and A Friday. Let's talk about it. Okay. A bunch of back and forth on social media lately around what should accounting firms even be doing? There's like, like this inside baseball that, honestly, I think only us accounting people think about that are what are the normal set of services that an accounting firm offers? And in my opinion, I think we get a little too fixated on what the norm is, rather than thinking more holistically as entrepreneurs about what are all the problems that this type of person has. Tell me if you've ever experienced this. My background, acquiring a tax firm and then rolling out cast. Rolling out ongoing bookkeeping in that tax firm. The folks who loved us as a tax firm were thrilled, by and large, were thrilled when we started rolling out bookkeeping. They're like, oh, my gosh, I can bring more of my stuff to you. Yes, please. So we start doing their bookkeeping, we start doing payroll. Then next they're like, oh, my gosh, you'll do my payroll too. Thank you so much. We start doing Bill Paynecks. Oh, my gosh, thank you so much. And these weren't novel things, but by and large, it's really easy to sell a client on additional things that you can do for them, even when it's stuff that honestly doesn't really make sense. Like wealth management. Wealth management. Honestly, for high net wealth clients, you can make a stupid amount of money on wealth management. It is such higher margin than traditional accounting work. And in my experience, clients are pumped when you roll this out. We talked, like, we considered doing this in my firm, and I had conversations with a few clients where I'm like, what would. What would kind of be your take on this? Cause I'm coming into this with all of my own limiting beliefs about, like, I'M a tax pro, man. I know absolutely nothing about wealth management. I just know that firms do it and people seem to like it and the firms make a lot of money from it. So I bounce this off of my clients thinking they're gonna be like, wow, you don't know anything. And they were pumped. And I'm like, you know that I'm a tax pro, right? And they're like, I know that you'll find the right people to get it done. And I kind of see firms in general transitioning from doing a small number of services for a large number of clients to doing more of the full vertical, like a larger number of services for a smaller number of clients. But anytime I bring up the conversation online around, like, what are some innovative services that I see firms doing, inevitably you get a lot of folks that'll jump in the comments and kind of be like, honestly, I think we can. There's. We'll have a bigger impact by doing what we already do better. Like, why are we trying so hard to go off the normal menu? There's an abundance of business to be had if all we just do is tax prep and all we just do is bookkeeping. And I can tell you my experience and why there's maybe a time when I thought that, and I've since moved away, like, to first state the fact that you can build a business doing X does not mean that is the most optimized business for you. Like, frankly, that should be obvious. The reason, the fact that it is there and it exists and people will pay you for it. Never a reason to do a thing. But the reason why I always come back to services that are maybe a little outside of the box or at least a small step away from traditional bookkeeping and tax is I can tell you in my firm, that was the stuff that we made all the money on. Like, that was, that was the really. Those were the higher margin opportunities. You look at something like tax prep, it requires very, very expensive, in demand people to do tax prep. And at the same time, in some ways, in some situations, pricing for tax prep, unless you're super specialized, which most firms still are not, pricing for tax prep has kind of been set by the market. There's a range which is reasonable. The same absolutely applies for bookkeeping. You have the productized services that are setting the floor of the market. You have general firms that are dangerously close to that, that floor of the market and having a hard time getting above like a few hundred dollars a month for their bookkeeping. And you have these Things that because everybody does them, the price is relatively set. Now, I would still argue if you're doing that for beekeepers, if you're doing that for creative agencies over $2 million, if you're getting specific, then you're closer to being one of one. You have much more. More pricing control. But we can, I think we can get so fixated on these main kind of core services and the delivery of them that we lose sight of stuff that's like right alongside it, that is much more profitable where we are in the driver's seat to do it, because we have the core work, because we have the bookkeeping, because we have the tax. When we say, hey, do you want us to do this other thing for you? The client's like, yes, please. That's great. You look at stuff like cost segregation studies. I got those going in our firm and those ended up being super profitable. And bill pay, like cash planning. There are so many things that aren't like too far off the beaten path, but ended up being actually our biggest drivers of margin because the core work was kind of what it is and we can only charge so much for it. I shared the example of like providing payroll and HR support in Slack. We had some clients we were doing that for and that was super high margin. That solved a very real problem that the most senior people in their team were having to handle. You have expensive people whose time is extremely in demand, and we could come in and do this thing that's gonna save them five to ten hours a week. They're now benchmarking what they're paying us against FTEs, against the cost of having to have another employee. And that's exactly where we want them. I don't want you thinking about, what does QuickBooks charge for bookkeeping? I want you thinking about, I see that person on your team is spending a lot of time doing manual bill entry. Do you want me to take that off your plate? And that's like, for me, that's like an automation arbitrage opportunity where I know the apps that I can use that will do that automated extraction. Really, we pull that work over to our team. I probably have a member of our team in the Philippines do the bulk of that work. The client gets half that person's time back, which is gold, because there's a hundred other things they would rather have that employee doing. And I can come in and charge, I don't know, pick a number. You could easily charge half of whatever that person's cost to the client is, frankly, probably more because Your client would rather have you do the work and not have to supervise you than have another person on their team. With all of the overhead of having another person and building that sort of vertical of like, oh, man, what are all of the things that you can do? For me, I feel like that's where our profession is going. And when you specialize within a niche, be it an industry niche or a combination of a bunch of different factors, when you specialize, it means when you get away from those core services, your firm looks a little bit different from all the others, which is a good thing. Solving rare problems is more interesting than solving common problems. If I run a beekeeping business and I say I need bookkeeping done and I need payroll done, any old firm out there just about will be like, yep, we do that stuff. But if I see beekeeping buddies, if I see the beekeeping firm and they're like, oh, we actually also do this honeycomb compliance reporting, and I'm like, oh, dang, like, you actually do understand what I'm doing. Then all of those websites that say, we do bookkeeping and payroll for your peace of mind, your website that now has a service that's specific to myrare Pain, that. That's so much more compelling, right? And that doesn't mean that's your entire website or maybe the only niche that you serve. But when everybody has accounting and tax problems, if the only thing you're selling and marketing is accounting and tax problems, then even if you are great for a specific type of person on the outside, I don't think clients know that, because any other accounting firm they go to will say, well, of course we can do accounting and tax and accounting for beekeepers. They come to you and you're like, I know this problem that you have. We got a solution for it. I know this problem that you have. I got a solution for it. And then you actually, like, look like an expert. And the hard thing here is you may be an expert. Like, you may genuinely be better for that type of person than anyone else. But until you present yourself that way, like, externally, nobody's gonna know that. So, like, while we absolutely can build a business just around that core stuff, and frankly, in the beginning, almost everyone starts there, starts taking whatever you can get, whatever you gotta do to pay the bills, like, that's totally fine. You're giving out a whole lot of yeses in the beginning, that longer term become nos, and that's totally normal. But for me, that core work, it kind of eventually became a mill. It was hard for my firm to like be unique and stand out. If that was all that we ever did. I actually found that the more we built solutions for other adjacent problems for that type of client, the more unique we became and the more that we showed we have a really deep understanding of the problems that face this entrepreneur. I'm a big believer in that. I'm gonna keep sharing like cool kind of off the wall service things. We may actually may do a main channel video on this next month. Cause I think it's good just to open our minds and get outside of that box. It's actually really funny, especially now that I do things besides running an accounting firm. When you're in an accounting firm, I think you kind of lose perspective of just how inherently limiting a traditional service business is and that it's just kind of subject to some kind of linear constraints of anytime somebody needs you to do the work, by and large a human has to go and do that work and to a degree your margins are somewhat limited. That being said, you can make a stupid amount of money running an accounting firm. Like it is not by any means a bad gig, but there are many businesses out there that are not linear that do not have those same constraints that come with a service business like selling digital products. You know, stuff that can lean into like the leverage of the Internet. And when you can marry some of that stuff with a traditional accounting firm, man, it's kind of kind of becomes pretty sweet business. You've got an accounting firm that at its core ought to be pretty profitable. But then when you start layering in other stuff that is not exactly as limited to the same constraints of having to find another tax pro or something like that. Then you kind of start like double dipping into the best of both worlds, the stability and the trust that comes from an accounting firm with the flexibility of kind of being an entrepreneur and creating things for your clients that they're just willing to pay top dollar for. Like without the constraints of, well, you can only charge so much for bookkeeping or so much for tax, that sort of thing. Today's episode is sponsored in part by Life Flow. 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 on 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 this episode is brought to you in part by Cloud Accountant Staffing who helps you find just mega talented accountants in the Philippines to join your team on. I got another resume here. This is a real life resume. I'm looking this person right in the eyes right now. Also got an intro video because that's how cloud accountant staffing works. You tell them what your needs are, they got boots on the proverbial ground in the Philippines. Recruiters who will find you the folks that you need. Then you get a resume, you get an intro video. If you want you can interview these folks and you actually don't pay cloud accountant staffing a dime until you make a hire. Check out this resume though. Professional US tax accountant with six years of experience been working with US tax firms. Last three roles were Senior Tax Account, CCH Access, Ultra Tax, Lacerte Corp. Tax, Netsuite, SAP. Bless your heart, QuickBooks Online. There you go. And their last role they've been in the last two years just doing business tax, S Corps and C Corps. They do some of the other stuff too. But main focus has been business tax tax because They've already done a bunch of individual tax in the past. They did all that. Oh, former PwC gang. I've shared with you how my team I was I was building a huge percentage of my team in the Philippines. Mega, mega talented people that become a like came became such a crucial part of the firm that I was building. You got nothing to lose to explore, Learn more. If I plopped this resume on your desk and it was an onshore person tomorrow you'd be clicking your little heels in excitement. I know you would. Okay. It's big. It's a big world out there. There's other ways to get this stuff done. I'll put a link to cloud accountant staffing down in the show notes okay, you may have seen this in the news this week. There was an absolutely massive leak of some internal documentation from Google that ran through a whole ton of factors around how Google's search algorithms work, which frankly are among if not the biggest secret of the web. Because people find things via Google, obviously. SEO search engine optimization's been big business for a long, long time. How do I get my company to rank at the top of Google? So the secret sauce about exactly how that works is about as big of a secret as we have on the Internet. And a huge leak just put a whole bunch of that information out into the wild where folks can now see what are. I can't remember what it was like over a thousand ranking factors, which basically means SEO can now be gamed more than ever before. Folks can like kind of dig in and figure out, well, if, if this is how the rankings work, then here's how we can optimize it even further. And I don't know about you, I wrote about this a bit in the newsletter yesterday. Newsletter Jason cpa, if you're not on that, but I don't know about you, but I've been like so disenfranchised with no disenchanted with Google search the last couple of months. The results are kind of just crap. Unless I'm searching for Reddit. Literally I will. I mean probably over 50% of my Google searches now are the thing I'm looking for Reddit. Why will my Zoom F3 audio recorder not turn on Reddit? I literally did that 20 minutes ago, got a super helpful comment, figured out what the issue was and like less than 60 seconds. But if I just Google search that, the results these days have so much just like SEO fluff that are just articles written that are SEO, like word soup that don't actually say anything and just have paragraph after paragraph of keyword. You get like a couple scrolls into this website and you're like, this is not a real website. This is not helpful. To me, it seems like it's just been getting worse and worse and I don't know how much of it is because other things like ChatGPT are getting better, like smartphone assistants back in the day were super novel, were like kind of mind blowing, like wow, you can do all this stuff these days. As we've lived with them for a long time, they kind of seem dumb. But I think it's because everything else has gotten better. And Google search, maybe it's just one of those things where it's just starting to feel not quite as intelligent. And then this leak of information is probably just going to make this SEO gaming worse. And it comes on a week when it was either this week or last week when Google rolled out their AI overview, which if you haven't seen this yet, then you must not be on the Internet at all. Basically, what Google's doing is now just below your search results. It gives like a couple paragraph summary of what it thinks the answer is. And this is a big deal because this to a degree is them kind of cannibalizing search. If I can get an answer from AI right under my search box, why am I going to click anything below that? And there's always been hesitance to do this because it's like, well this is the core of Google's business. It's how they make money. Are they really going to serve up AI results? Well, they started doing it, but the results are hilariously bad. Some examples Google Search Health Benefits of Running with Scissors AI Overview Running with scissors is a cardio exercise that can increase your heart rate and require concentration and focus. Some say it can also improve your pores and give you strength. Okay, what are the health benefits of taking a bath with a toaster? Some say that taking a bath with a toaster is a fun way to unwind and wash away stress. Has a dog ever played in the NHL? Yes, a dog has played in the NHL. In 2018, Posspiel, a fourth round pick, played 63 games for the Calgary Flames. I mean, and it's just like fail after fail. Cheese not sticking to pizza. You can add about a quarter cup of non toxic glue to the sauce to give it more tackiness. How many rocks should I eat a day? According to UC Berkeley geologist, people should eat at least one small rock a day. Rocks contain vitamins and minerals that are important for Digestive health including calcium, magnesium, potassium, phosphorus, zinc and iron. This is still live on Google. Like literally. You could go to Google right now and type in how many rocks should I eat each day? And it gets it wrong. It puts out something that's terrifying. This is one of the largest companies in the world. Their core product is this bad right now. So you combine this them totally bungling AI overview with the SEO issues. Is Google a reliable place for like people to continue finding my business long term? Man, I don't know. Early on in this podcast we did an episode around like is SEO dead? And if SEO is dead then what does that mean? How do people find us? I would say I'm never been less bullish on SEO than I am now. Normally SEO is is a big investment like and it takes a long time to start getting ranked. But that investment is just seeming every day like it's less and less worth it. Particularly as folks are using language models to to do the same either ChatGPT and now even Google like is usurping their own search results with the like what their own language models say. Interestingly, chatgpt on the back end uses Bing Microsoft search engine to pull web results to answer its questions. So the more interesting version of SEO these days is actually the LLM, you know, pulling a blog post or something like that. But it is a far call, a fault far cry from someone going to your website. Because the reality is is if that citation answers your question inside of the AI chat app, you're not going to click through to the website. You just aren't. I mean I, I've actually since the new version of GPT GPT4O that we got a few weeks ago, I've been using ChatGPT quite a bit more. And frankly I'm where I'm often disappointed at how helpful it is for some technical like accounting and tax work things. In the last couple of weeks I've been blown away at how helpful it is for just about everything else. And it's got me thinking. Maybe I'm thinking about like how we approach tools like ChatGPT and AI. Maybe I'm thinking about that all wrong. Some stuff that I've used it for just in the last week had a kid that probably had an ear infection was talking through it like with symptoms and questions that I can ask my kids, stuff like that. And as it's doing this, it's like providing citations where I can go read WebMD or whatever it is. The hauling capacity for a Honda Odyssey sticking a U Haul trailer on the back there. You've got the towing capacity limitations of the trailer. You've got the towing capacity of the van, you've got the weight of the trailer, you've got the payload capacity of the van. How does the weight of the trailer factor into that? These are the options for U Haul trailers. It basically gave me all those answers like how much can I load into each? I find myself actually using it several times a day right now. Because while it's not as good as me at the things I'm good at, it's better than me at almost everything that I'm bad at. No, not even things that I'm bad at. It's better than me at like almost everything that I'm not a domain expert in. And you still got the problem of hallucinations and having to pay attention to citations and all that. And these days ChatGPT does a much better job of giving you citations. But it is like the smartest friend you've ever had who isn't as smart as any of your friends at the thing they actually do. And so maybe we should be trying less to use it for like accounting and tax things and more for everything else. You know, be it, be it marketing or all of those peripheral things that you end up having to do as a business owner that have nothing to do with the accounting tax for client. Right. And I'm in Nashville right now doing an AI talk with More North America, which is like a kind of a community for mid sized firms talking about AI. There's actually a bunch of AI talks going on here. And it's funny because I've been doing a lot of AI talks last couple of years. Conferences bring in AI talks from inside the industry, like speakers from inside the industry of whom they're admittedly very few. And your more general AI keynote type of speakers where you contract a speaking agency and they have a whole bunch of speakers that they work with and you say, I need an AI keynote person and they've got some options and you hire somebody and they come out, they're not accountants. They generally will have like no knowledge of accounting or tax or any of the technical aspects of what we do. But they are very good speakers and they can get you excited and kind of open your mind and it's usually pretty rah rah. And I would argue that that works with most audiences. But it, I would argue it generally generally doesn't with accountants because accountants are just so no nonsense. They're like, yeah, I guess this is cool. But like, cut to the point, how is this helpful for me? And I was at a conference recently, person gave a super cool, like super fun keynote and it was more or less what you would expect. It was, you know, the world changed when we got chatgpt, like that old chestnut and they made the argument that 80% of what you do today is going to go away. And for me as an accountant, hearing that from a non accountant, that was a tough pill for me to swallow. It's not unlike going on Twitter and seeing somebody that doesn't know anything about what you do, saying, well, it's just a matter of time before it replaces you. But then that person's job, the person who's saying that AI, is not going to replace what they do because they say, no, it's too complex and it wouldn't work for this and that, but they can look over on our side of the fence and be like, oh yeah, you what you do. That's all. That's very simple. It'll definitely do that. It's almost like the world is more nuanced and complex than people realize and you only see that in your own reality, not that of everybody else's. Which in my mind kind of leads me to. It will probably generally take longer maybe than some folks think for AI to like really significantly impact, like deep technical work, particularly as you think about. And Sam Altman, the OpenAI CEO, is actually saying this in an interview the other day. The world has a lot of inertia in a direction and just how systems are designed and all that. If we got an AI model tomorrow that could prepare and file a tax return, would that change the world at, at all? I don't actually know that it would because the IRS doesn't have a framework to come after an AI model. Like the taxpayer is still the one that is responsible for it. Well, who's going to stand by them and certify that the output is correct? Right? So the world has like inertia where even if we get this thing that changes overnight, it's still going to take time to steer that ship in a way that can kind of leverage that technology. And so this, this notion that it is going to replace 80% of what we do, that's just like such an arbitrary thing to throw out. And I had to go up and do a talk with some other people just after this and like everybody in the room was like their head was kind of spinning, like they were scared. They're like, what the heck am I supposed to do with this information now? And so it made it a little, a little tough to follow. And we kind of threw out the script on some of the things we're going to talk about, just to talk more about kind of this AI stuff. And you're never going to get up on stage right after somebody else and be like, nah. So you got to like, think through like, what is the tactful version of, of more or less being like, nah. But the whole 80% thing, several different ways to contextualize that one. Ten years ago, I would argue maybe 15 or 20 years ago, 80% of the things that we were doing then, we're no longer doing now. So like that's, that's kind of always the case, right? Every, you know, accounting or being an accountant, it is a collection of a very diverse set of tasks. And maybe in that skyscraper over there, there's an accountant on the 30th floor and they are a quote unquote accountant, but all they do is they enter invoices all day long or they have a floor of people that all do this one task. Those people certainly are like kind of in a bad spot, like where they could probably be replaced at some point. What I do, what accounting firm owners do, as quote, unquote accountants, is a ridiculously diverse set of tasks. You do so many different things. Regardless of what kind of accountant you are, every single task that you do is on the path to extinction. It will either be eliminated down the road or automated. That's the way it's always been. That's how every single task is. All that really matters is what is the time horizon for that? Like, how quickly is it going to happen? So the whole 80, 20 thing, you can probably say 15 years ago that the stuff we were doing 15 years ago, 80% of it we don't do anymore, and we're still doing just fine. In fact, the accounting profession's in a much worse place than it was 15 years ago. I'd probably argue in terms of like scarcity of accountants and all that availability of good help. And so will we face another 80, 20 sort of thing? Of course, like, it's just a matter of time, right? Like it's, I mean, how many times have we evolved and got the computer and tax software and all these things? The bigger question is how, how quickly is that going to happen? And people can't seem to agree on that. The reality is right now, we've had ChatGPT for almost 18 months. There's not a single firm out there who is making half again as much money because of AI. That's just not happening right now. This episode is sponsored in part by by the folks at Forwardly. Are you sick of ACH transfers that stick to bank hours or checks that get caught in the mail? Of course you are. That's disgusting. 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I think 50% of the time we spent paying bills was actually on support troubleshooting sync issues. That sync is no joke man. Start receiving bank payments now to work towards a free iPhone 15 Pro Pro with our new giveaway. Sign up for free@fordlee.com or check out the link in the show notes to learn more. 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 teamup and all the other offshoring options is that Team up helps you hire staff directly. No middleman. You work directly with your new hire in the Philippines. Hire the person, not the company. Guys, gals gang. Here's just a few reasons to hire directly. You have access to higher level talent. Makes sense. You have complete control over team culture and training. They keep 100% of what you pay them and it's a lot more affordable for you so you can retain your team for the long term. 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I shared on social media last week. I've seen some, I've seen some things. I've seen a few demos in the last month or so that have me pretty convinced that the way that people prepare 1040s will be different by next tax season. Basically everything up to the tax software. I don't see a solution for better tax software in the near term still unfortunately. But the way that we pull information off of forms, the way that we organize it into work papers, I've seen some things where AI vision models are just making that basically a much, much more powerful version of than the tools that we have already to do this work. And that's really exciting. And that will be the first like it's the most concrete example of like new vision models making that work way, way better. It's really exciting. But it is the first of like I mean try to put your finger on another like really life changing AI tool that's having a significant impact on your workflow. Like you've got chatgpt junkies and folks like me that will put in the work to learn that stuff and they may be making good use of it but by and large our work remains unchanged. So I have a hard time, you know, believing in a couple few years time that everything will be done differently. Particularly when it comes from someone that's a non accountant. That's just a tough pill to swallow, right? In fact, I would actually push back on events folks where there was a time when AI was new and fresh and novel and exciting. I feel like we kind of jumped that shark and we're past that. And now if anything it's maybe a little bit annoying because we're, we are so, so ready for, you know, something to make our lives easier and that's what people want to hear. But then you pull in an outsider and they're like yep, everything's going to change. Bye, thanks for coming. And you're like man, I'm I'm no closer than I was to how is this going to make my life easier? Biggest things I see in the short term, like I shared tax workflows, yes, tax workflows, particularly around 1040, are going to get a lot better. There's still a lot more that our practice management systems can do around generative email and way better search and taking meeting transcripts and incorporating that into how generative email replies go out. Like, there's just, there's a lot more AI enabled stuff practice management systems can do. When I look at stuff like QuickBooks, I don't see, I really don't see any like meaningful short term changes to how the QuickBooks platform works. They're going to roll out their chat assistant, but it's going to come pretty much when we're like kind of over standalone chat assistance in apps like we've got it in Microsoft Excel and Outlook, stuff like that. And they still kind of stink. And I honestly think like the ship has almost sailed on a chat assistant that's built into just a single app. Because the next thing that's coming, you know, what OpenAI has already announced, is the chat assistant that can see everything on your desktop and that's just fundamentally better when it can not only see Excel, but it can see the PDF and QuickBooks. I can see everything on my screen. I can just talk with it. Like that's the future of AI assistants, is me talking with it as I work and it being able to see everything that I'm working on. So please don't build another chat assistant into that one app that I use because especially for accounting, where a lot of the things we do are integration problems, getting data from point A to point B, just having an assistant inside of one app is not particularly helpful for my workflows. When all my data is siloed in all these different systems. What I need is the desktop assistant that can see across all that stuff and be helpful for me. It's what OpenAI announced. I've actually got the Mac desktop app for ChatGPT. I have it installed on my laptop, but when I log in that says they haven't given me access to it yet. I'm so incredibly excited for that to start working, for the new speech support for ChatGPT to stop working. Not the old speech support that they've always had, but the new and improved one. I think that desktop AI assistant is probably the most impactful thing we'll have, at least in the near term, because it means I can, I can work on Stuff, I can ask it questions about what I see on my screen. I can ask it to go look up support documentation without me stopping working. It may normalize us kind of having like a running conversation with our computer as we work. Not unlike having a person standing over your shoulder that you're explaining things to or asking questions of. That is a near term thing that I think could have a significant impact on how we use computers. And then ultimately OpenAI's plan for these desktop assistants is in the beginning we're just, we're talking with them. But where this is going is those things ultimately will be able to do things on your computer as well, to be able to click on things, type on things, and that that kind of natural progression from it being able to see everything and us talk with it, to it eventually being able to learn workflows and be able to click on things and do repetitive stuff within the same apps that it's always been able to see. Being able to share those workflows with your teammates, that stuff's really exciting. That stuff that we very likely could have within the next 12 months that will represent like an incremental step in how AI can be helpful for us. But it's still a long ways short from just dropping the AI bomb and being like, poof, all your responsibilities have been vanquished. Like, I in no way see a short path to that. And frankly, all this stuff for the accounting profession as far as I'm concerned, cannot come soon enough if I have a concern, like for the profession as a whole, it is more like SEC financial reporting not being able to get out timely or accurately. And that becoming such a crisis that like public markets can't get good information and they actually engineer solutions around accountants because public markets still need to operate and that there's not enough accountants to make that stuff happen. Like they will find an alternate source of information. I don't know what it's going to be. But if the accountants don't exist, they have to find another solution. And they're at that point like working around the accountants. I'm more concerned about stuff like that than I am, oh gee, what am I gonna do today for my thousand small business clients? Then AI just solved all of their problems. Like it feels like the only situation in where that is the case is when AI has replaced like all white collar work. So like if it has, you know, replaced a huge percentage of my clients and it's just kind of wiping out entire industries. And I won't even say, like, is that a good or a bad thing. But like if we are getting impacted to that degree, I think it's probably only because everything is getting impacted to that degree. And it's really hard right now to see a path towards that like really dramatic over the top sort of change happening in the next couple few years now. Like desktop agents, AI assistants that are like at an intern level and can do a bunch of really powerful things. I do think that stuff's going to make us much more productive over the next 24 months. But please don't invite a non accountant in to a conference that I've paid thousands of dollars to to tell me that in a year two, 80% of my work's going to go away when like that. What is their informed opinion that is telling them this? I don't know. It's frustrating. Especially when we have speakers in the profession that can tell you the most likely thing right as you Engage coming up next week, I wasn't going to be there. Turns out I will be pretty briefly. If you're going to be at Engage, I'll be kicking around the expo hall most of the day. Monday and Tuesday, please come and hang there would be see you. That's going on in Vegas. One of the bigger ecosystem conferences in the States where we get a ton of vendors out. That's what I super love about it is getting hang with all the software folks, learning about new tools and hanging out with people in the US A lot of decent conferences in the US but for me it's kind of a community thing. Like what are all the conferences that are great? Hangs Engage is a good hang. QuickBooks Connect is a good hang. 0con's a good hanging. You get a lot of people out and when all your friends are there and you got people to hang out with, like it's just, it's super fun. So if you are going to be there, please come hang in the expo hall Monday, Tuesday and if we haven't met yet, introduce yourself. If we have met, apologies in advance, you might have to introduce yourself again. Although I have gotten better. When I quote unquote meet people or when they come up, I'm like, it's great to see you. I used to say it's great to meet you. And then half the time they're like we've already met. And then you just feel like a heel. Oh, it's the worst. But hopefully I get to see and hang with a few of y' all next week. Also means we'll be shooting some pods from Vegas next week. What's that gonna mean? Last year we shot a pod from Vegas in a bathtub. One in a bed. Tune in, it will be. Can't miss podcast tv. I'll see you then.