255 Should This Firm’s Site Have A Pricing Calculator?

Okay, we got a brand spanking new firm. They just did 80k in their first year. We got a whole bunch of details about the firm. We are roasting this firm today, offering our sage, hardened, experienced wisdom to this relatively new firm owner. They're doing some cool stuff. Nothing in particular that we really need to dunk on, but I'm gonna share with you a bunch of details about this firm. Would love to hear. What is your, like, one bit of advice for this new firm owner? I got a few ideas that I'm gonna share. One of the big ones being they got a pricing calc on their website. How should we feel about that? Is that okay? Is that good? Is that bad? Lord knows the Internet's opinionated about them. Right? Okay, come on in. Let's. Let's get to roasting. Okay, straight off the top, props to this person for going out and starting their own firm and doing 80k in revenue their first full time year. Boom. Knuckles. Give them right on in here. That's great. That might be the hardest thing you ever do in your firm. Deciding to start it. It's not for everybody. Oh, mama, is it? Not for everybody, but good for you doing it. Okay, here's all the deets, by the way. This person submitted their info about their firm last Friday. Let me run the numbers for you. One, two, three. That's four days ago. You know what that means? You use the little link, the little form in the show notes here. Give me the deets on your firm. The next firm cooking could be yours. All right, so new owner, their revenue's 90% coming from accounting, 10% from tax, and part of that 90% of accounting, like they're doing a little bit of advisory, but we'll call it 9010 accounting tax. They did 80, 80 grand, top line, in their first full time year. The firm is fully virtual, works with clients nationwide, but most of their clients are generally in rural areas. Specialization. They work with the home improvement industry. I wonder what that means. Home improvement industry. What a classic show that was, though. Home improvement. So home improvement industry, up to $3 million. That is 22% of their business. And quote, tech, which is no longer their specialty, but that still makes up 78% of their business. They're in the process of moving away for it, so they already know who they're for. And the trick here is to not get too caught up on, am I going to want to be for this forever? The answer is no, you little snowflake. You're not going to be anything forever. But some Specialization is better than no specialization. And it's okay for you to to change your mind because you learn about specialization through specializing. You're not going to say hmm, one day I will be in the shower and have a eureka moment and realize who I should niche down to and that will be our thing from till the end of that's not how anything works. You just gotta start cause you learn a bunch just by doing it. So good for this person starting specialized who the makeup of their team. My husband helps out a little on the weekends during tax time. Bless. He used to help part time with bookkeeping while he was in college full time but he recently graduated. Wow. Congrats. Grad Cadence the old business cycle Number one They do monthly or quarterly financials and insights by the 20th. 2 tax prep begins at the start of March. It goes beginning to mid March and then beginning to mid April. So that's when all the tax stuff goes out the door. Part of March and part of April. Doesn't that sound nice? That is the benefit of only doing tax work for your accounting clients. Tax season doesn't get too sweaty. 3. Tax planning happens July to September. Interesting. That's kind of early. I mean good that it's early, but a lot of people wait until the end of the year. Payrolls biweekly or bimonthly, 1099's in January. Sales tax quarterly or monthly and then CFO calls monthly, quarterly or annually after financials are released. Pricing I buckle up. The minimum is $500 per month. My all in one package is priced based on revenue. Mostly they said with this type of business generally at certain revenues you can fairly accurately predict transaction volume, number of accounts, that sort of thing. And they got a pricing calculator on their website with like that's priced according to their revenue. I'm actually looking at the pricing calculator now. So it's got a little slider of annual revenue. When you get beyond like a third of the way up it says schedule a discovery call and it doesn't give you a price anymore. It's to going. Got some other clarifying questions about how many businesses you have, how many rental properties you have, how many states you live or work in, how many employees you have that need to go on payroll. Pretty good. So basically everything maybe 40% down on the revenue slider, it will give you a price and then above that it says we gotta schedule a call. We're gonna circle back to that one. Billing upfront monthly, everything's fixed. Monthly sales and marketing 90% referral and the rest from LinkedIn. Nice tech stack Drake for Tax Ignition. They're using Tax Gnome for their practice management System and then QBO, NetSuite, Gross Wave, Zapier for automation stuff. They're on Google Workspace. Wow. So hip Keeper and ChatGPT. You buttering me up. All right. Workflow they said this is what our process will be the first year with a little all over the place for tax, the client gets a proposal from either Taxdome or Ignition and and they require the payment method upfront to sign. That proposal goes out in December. An organizer sent out via taxdome in January with auto reminders. When the return's done, it's printed to the taxdome portal. The client signs and authorizes us to file. After reviewing the return, they chat over the phone. If they have any questions, they're invoiced and paid automatically. So you already have their payment method upfront. So you invoice it when it's done and pull the funds. Great job man. So nice to be able to start with that day one to not have to retrain clients to that expectation down the road. Tax returns electronically filed through Drake if payment comes through and the client's alerted when the returns approved by the agency. On the accounting side, they're either automatically sending requests like tasks to the client every single month or they wherever possible get view only access so they can fetch that stuff themselves. All of this is making me so happy. Review tasks are completed in Keeper and and release financials from there to the portal Innkeeper. The financials have insights for the clients and specific KPIs or metrics that show if they're on track with the industry and their goals. Then they use their calendar link to book a phone call or zoom call to review them if they have an advisory call subscription. Interesting Pains making sure pricing's right. That pain never goes away. A second is sales. LinkedIn can take up to 70 hours a month and referrals are great, but they usually want tax and I'm no longer offering just tax. Yep, I don't have the sales to support hiring an agency. I did start using an analytics tool that's helping manage DMs and connections and then third, ensuring I'm using the most efficient and cost effective software that'll allow me to stay solo for a few years or maybe just hire a part time bookkeeper. I can tell you you're crushing it on the tech stack front. Honestly, I don't, I don't really have any notes. You got a great set of Tools there you're doing the right thing using client facing tasks. We'll get into this more when we talk about sort of recommendations, but just long term like positioning and pricing and all that. That's probably the big thing, which is the big thing for every firm, not just new firms. Enjoyment. What are the stuff they like? I love talking with my clients and helping them see the silver lining. Getting them to set goals and showing them what achieving them looks like and analyzing trends and data. Other thing they enjoy Sales. Is this an accountant? That's it, the whole thing. Pricing, setting, setting up proposals, following up on sales, getting leads. DMing to get warm leads. Window shopping people in the sales navigator and LinkedIn to find appropriate clients. Every part of sales it actually says nope at the very end of that. I don't know if that means they don't like sales or they do like sales, but it's in the what they enjoy box. So if they don't enjoy it, then this one's on you for not correctly completing the form. Okay, this person's crushing it, man. They've got like the workflow and the tools. They're not doing a bunch of manual stuff to track down information from clients, they're from the get go saying that we're only going to do tax work for our accounting clients. That's great. Couple things, actually, three things I'll share kind of my initial thoughts. I don't wanna sound like a broken record on this stuff all the time, but oftentimes there's common trends here. One, for this type of business, the bottleneck is always inevitably the month end close and people wanting their stuff faster. Right now they're delivering everything by the 20th. The reality is if you tell every single client that the delivery timeframe is the 20th, you're actually in practice like finishing stuff usually from like the third to the 20th. And the sticky thing there is when you get it done on the third, it's like do I give it to em on the 3rd or do I wait till the 20th? Because if I give it to em on the 3rd this month and then I give it to em on the 12th month, they might be annoyed. In fact, if I, if I give it to em on the fifth three months in a row and then I give it to em on the 12th on the fourth month they're gonna be annoyed or think something is wrong. It's like buddy, your engagement is for the 20th of the month and whether all you do is accounting or whether you're a tax firm, that's paring down your volume of tax and moving to just ongoing monthly work. This ends up being the constraint for every single one of these firms, and the best solution I can come up with is make less and less of what you do dependent on that formal month end close. They talked about KPIs and things that they're looking out for. There increasingly are ways that you can get clients this information near real time. Not that they always need to be monitoring it, because they shouldn't. That's generally a waste of time. But for any given set of financial statements, if we're delivering them on the 20th, we're already up to 50 days behind what happened. It's not even just about, you know, even if we get it out on the first of the month, we're already 30 days behind the eight ball on certain things. This episode is sponsored in part by Live Flow Pop Quiz look to your left. Look to your right. You're in Excel or Google Sheets, if you're into that kind of thing. How long is it going to take you to pull QuickBooks data from any of your clients? Any report into that spreadsheet that you're in right now? The answer to this pop quiz? It'll take you a little bit, a little while, decent amount of time. But imagine if your Excel or your Google Sheets just had a button you could push a magic button that would pull in any old data from QuickBooks from any of your clients that you have access to in qbl. Let's talk about this magic button a little more. Here's what would happen. You'd click on it. A little side panel would come out. It would greet you, say, hello Keith, how's your day going? It'd give you a dropdown that was every single QBO file you have access to, and then a second dropdown of all of the QuickBooks reports you could possibly want to pull out of it. And then various other buttons and knobs for adjusting settings, filters, and all that stuff. Just to be super clear, this button exists and it's called Live Flow. Anytime you are hustling spreadsheets, you are a mere few clicks away from dumping out some data from an accounting file. Not just once. You can set it to update, like ongoing. You can set the date ranges of the reports to be like rolling, like relative to today. So like, you know, an AP report that is always up to date or something like that. Because you know where you oftentimes need your QuickBooks data. Not in QuickBooks. And you know who I oftentimes don't want to be in my client's QuickBooks file. The only place that data is almost anyone. Oftentimes I don't even want my client in that QuickBooks file. That's live Flow basically sticks a button right in your spreadsheet app that lets you pull anything from any of your clients QuickBooks files. Learn more about that one link in the Show Notes this episode is sponsored in part by Cloud Accountant Staffing. The people who find you awesome hires in the Philippines to make your wildest getting stuff done dreams come true. I've shared many times. I hired a bunch of folks in the Philippines, completely changed our approach to fulfillment in our firm. I got a resume in front of me that is an actual person. Cloud accountant staffing placed into a firm, you actually get both a resume and a video intro. Based on that, you can decide if you want to do an interview with them or not. Let me just run you through this. This person got their Bachelor's in accounting in 2019. Ever since then they've worked with US based public accounting firms. How's this sound? Daily recording of bank transactions, monthly reconciliations, preparing financials, posting payroll journal entries, cleanup work for new projects, 1099 filing worked directly with clients and even became the trainer for their colleagues on QBO practices. Experience with qbo Xero Gusto QBO Certified I mean you run an accounting firm, you get a resume like this, you're like yes please. Right? This person's actually got experience. Not an accountant that's just like gone and work for a company, but somebody with a bunch of public accounting experience working with US companies. That's what I'm looking for. They know what like volume, getting the books done looks like. Again, this is a real person, a real resume. When you work with cloud accountant staffing, basically all you do, you hop on a call with them, you say here's my needs. They have recruiters on the ground in the Philippines who will go find great applicants for you, bring all that info back to you. Resumes, intro videos, all that. You decide whether you want to interview them. And you only ever cut a check to Cloud Accountant staffing. If you make a hire, what do you have to lose? Huh? Huh? Learn more at the link in the Show Notes. So I'm looking at this more and more in terms of as a business, how do we solve for the problem of that month end close deadline bottleneck? It's by making the conversation not about the month end close. It's about moving more of the things that they're monitoring to being real time. Actually to go back on that word monitoring. I have never liked dashboards because, you know, what I don't need in my life is one more thing to sit there and watch. That's not useful to me. Oftentimes people use dashboards as like daily reporting. That's not a dashboard to me. That is like a report that I'm going to look at every single day. Great. These days though, what's much more useful to me than a quote unquote dashboard or even a daily report that I'm reviewing is, is just notify me if any of these metrics are outside of an acceptable threshold. That's what I really want. I don't want to sit there and watch a thing. I want somebody to tell me when that thing is outside of the range that I approved. And if we think about KPIs in this way, that they need to be operating within a certain range, how many of those KPIs can we get reporting on near real time? It's probably going to depend on the frequency at which you're doing the bookkeeping. I think a growing number of firms are moving towards doing bookkeeping for clients weekly because then we don't have a full month of work to do at the month end close. And I think this makes sense if we're trying to like optimize for the month end close. It's probably a little more work in total than waiting until the end of the month to do it all. In fact, there's a lot of people that actually swear by not doing this bench, the service bench has never done the actual bookkeeping weekly. They only do it a month at a time. But also the expectation for bench is that the books aren't closed until the 25th of the following month. So I think they're just doing it once a month to absolutely maximize how much can be done in one sitting and to minimize back and forth with the business owner throughout the month. If we're trying to be a more white glove sort of service though, I think even though it may take ultimately a little more time, not may, it will take a little more time to classify and get everything caught up every single week instead of just at the end of the month, I do think that's still a worthwhile trade off to make. Because if you think about the whole business, your staffing needs are completely driven by how many staff do I need at the peak? Like maximum constraint. Right. It's all about the bottleneck. And so any other time that I can spend outside of that that reduces that Bottleneck is time well spent. So if it takes more time to do the bookkeeping on a weekly basis and, and that eases the one bottleneck that we have on the month end close, that's, that's actually a good trade off that it will take more time to do that stuff week over week. I don't know if this person does it week over week or not. But doing it week over week also makes it much easier to get the client near real time monitoring of, of certain KPIs. And the more that we can take the pressure off of things that can only be made available with a financial statement, the better. Now the financial statements still have to get done eventually, but you know, for me it was as simple as asking my clients, when I give you the financial statements, what do you look at? 70% of them would say nothing. We actually started like giving three minute videos with every financial statement delivery and they would just say, I just watched the video and whatever you tell me to do and that's it. And that was great. But in my experience, if you do have a client that digs into the financials, there's like two or three things that they look at and it's oftentimes who hasn't paid me? You know, they're actually, that's actually not even common because that's going to be out of date by the time they get the financials. The client that was always looking at that, they were in a big rush. I'm thinking back to my experience running a firm. The client that was digging into AR was always in a rush to get the financials at, at month end because they wanted a car. And that's a great example of financial statements being a wildly inefficient way of seeing who owes you money. So situations like that, let's find more real time ways that they can get that information to depressurize the biggest bottleneck in the company, in our firm, that is second on positioning man. Just keep fighting the good fight. You got to start somewhere, Everybody starts somewhere. And you're starting at a better place than, I mean 95% of people who build their own firms. Because you've got some specificity already. You're not going all in taking the easy stuff. Like you could sit there and take tax work, that's just tax season work all day long. But you're saying no to that, which is the right like long term decision for most people, unless you just want to do tax work. But for most people, if you're trying to build something that's not gonna give you like crazy volatility in your workflow then just doing tax work for your accounting clients. I think most people would agree these days is the move. And ultimately getting more for your time, being able to price more. It all boils down to your perceived expertise. I think you, I think I've gathered that you enjoy sales work. The one thing I will say about outbound sales is if you're too focused on outbound sales, oftentimes it can mean you're not investing enough time in developing your perceived expertise. The person that is a cold lead that comes to you, that starts working with you, has a, assigns a completely different value to you and your expert, you and your expertise than a person that has heard you on a podcast or has read your newsletter for a month. Something like that. There's a lot of really cool, and we talked about this on the pod, a lot of really cool ways that you can go out and track people down, like partnering with consultants. And this week we're gonna talk about how to partner with software companies to get in front of folks that could be great, great clients of yours. But at the end of the day, we just need to be thinking about how can we have clients come to us in a state where they're already wowed by us. They've already maybe built a degree of a relationship with us. Because when you have that, you have total control of the fees that you charge. So how do you get to the point where you're perceived as one of the experts within the group that you want to work with? So in your case, the specialization you're working on is home. Improve the home improvement industry up to 3 million. I don't know if that's like, I don't know, like house flippers. I don't know what that is. Remodelers maybe, because there's all sorts of different people in that ecosystem that you could potentially serve, right? But figure out where those people are hanging out, what conferences they're going to, what associations they're members in, and spend some time investing in your street cred. It may actually be a reason to think about a part time bookkeeper sooner than later. It's like that sort of perception building, like investment like that can feel like a long term investment where you're like, I'll go to the conference next year, like, we're too busy. I got stuff going on. That is something though that you want to be doing sooner than later. Because as soon as you do it, it makes a real difference in the money in the bank. Every day you're doing that, you're investing in your own ability to charge more. And when it comes to things that will help you charge more time, time lost is very well and truly money lost. So it could be worth thinking about pulling in that part time bookkeeper sooner than later, frankly. And I don't, and I'm not at all saying this because we have advertisers on this podcast that do this, frankly, because of how good offshore talent is and how quick and easy it is to pick up a really, really good, really attentive bookkeeper that can support you with your clients. For me, that's a no brainer cause that's not a big cost thing. In that case, you'd have to think about is this somebody that I want to be client facing? And then maybe it changes the conversation around whether that person's offshore or not. But right now, if it's just you and you're spending a bunch of time doing accounting work, an offshore bookkeeping hire I think makes a ton of sense, particularly if you can repurpose some of that time to invest it into your perceived expertise, into becoming one of the leading experts in that space. Maybe that's collaborating with, you know, influencers who are creating content. People who already have podcasts in this space. How do you become one of them? Because I mean, everything about running a small firm is about what kind of fees that you can command. And being able to charge more is about the perceived value of what you do. This episode is sponsored in part by T Squared. How digitally ready is your accounting firm? Hmm? You ever think about that? You ever lay in bed at night and think, am I properly securing my data? Is somebody hacking into the mainframe right now? Well, great news. Let me point you to a completely free 10 minute assessment that will give you customized results instantly about your firm's digital readiness. It's from the folks at T Squared. They help accounting firms like yours get their IT stuff sorted out. Oh, look at this. We've been working with accounting firms since 2014. B. Hall, CPA past, past guest of the podcast, Sherwood Tax Little Fish Accounting. Keela. Is Keela been on the podcast yet? Alison McLeod I see here T Squared supports a whole bunch of smart, capable accountants, but they put together this free tool to help you figure out if, if you're doing what you need to do. You know, keep on the straight and narrow. And personally, I love self assessments as much as the next guy. Which Harry Potter character are you? If you were a pizza topping, what would you be to be clear, this is not that this one's actually helpful. Check out the link down 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 is that Team up helps you hire staff directly. No middleman. You work directly with your new hire in the Philippines. Hire the person, not the company. Guys, gals gang. Here's just a few reasons to hire directly. You have access to higher level talent. Makes sense. You have complete control over team culture and training. They keep 100% of what you pay them and it's a lot more affordable for you so you can retain your team for the long term. Team up source accountants with experience working at US or Australian 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 going to get Robert Half to sponsor this? But 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. Last thing. Good old pricing calculators. People love to have strong opinions about pricing calculators for some reason. Maybe it's because it's kind of coming back to the old the old value pricing chestnut and nobody would ever be caught dead being accounting canceled by the value pricing crowd, right? Interesting story on pricing calculators. I was at a conference one time and there was a panel and sat right next to each other were two very successful firm owners. One was the owner of a like $10 million firm, the other was a solo owner of their firm and they were kind of going around answering all these different questions and somehow pricing calculators came up and the big firm owner said we use pricing calculators, it just makes everything way easier for us. And the solo firm owner was like give a very well thought out response about like here's how we do value pricing and how we Think pricing calculators actually work against us. And most of the crowd agreed with the solo firm runner. And the discussion even got to the point where it's like they were comparing apples to apples. And the reality is a firm with the right answer for a firm with 5,000 clients is not going to be the same as the right answer for a firm with 50 clients. In general, the bigger firms get, you see them turning to more like sort of turnkey ways of doing this. In fact, we've heard from Chad Davis on this podcast how them moving towards the budgeted hour has made their life running the firm infinitely more simple. I think there's a theoretical right answer here, and then there's the right answer for what you and the team are capable of doing. And those two things are not always going to be the same answer. One consideration here is the buyer. You know, I could tell you just about every single accountant gets really pissed off with software vendors if you won't tell them what the price is before scheduling a call. Now, like, software tools are much more commodities than the services that we provide for sure. But ultimately it just comes down to, like, what is going to be the most advantageous way for me to price an engagement. If you're giving anything away by having a pricing calculator out there, you, you're giving away the ability to do a bit more value pricing based on the perceived value that is specific to a client. Because as soon as you put a pricing calculator out there, like, people's minds will anchor to that price. So for example, you have somebody come in, let's say they were working with a larger firm and paying top dollar and having a really, really bad experience. What most firms do when they see that is they're like, oh, sweet, they were working with what firm? Oh yeah, we can come in way cheaper than that. And they come in, they take way better care of the client for half the price. When what we should be doing is looking at that fee and being like, tell me about all the things they were not doing for you and then I will tell you the price for us to do all that stuff for you. Really, really well, the reality is they were paying that price before and not getting what they wanted. It's not reasonable for that person to come to you and want better, a higher level service than what they had before and expect to pay less. And some clients will come to you with that expectation, especially if you don't look like a big, a big impressive firm. But the conversation there is real easy and it's one that many of us have had a lot of times where the client pushes back and they're like, well I paid the last person this much. Why are you more. And it's as simple as why are you changing accountants? We're more because you weren't getting what you needed before. And if there's anything you give up by standing up a pricing calculator, it's potentially this. The fact that you're actually going to have people come to you that are paying an order of magnitude different. Like you could have one relatively similar company coming in, paying for X some other company when they come in and you lose a degree of that pricing control when they come in if they see that pricing calculator. I'm not fully anti this. There's just going to be trade offs, there's going to be upsides and downsides. If it's super appreciated by the folks that are coming in the door, maybe that's worthwhile. I'll tell you one thing I'm actually not super into. That's kind of the current meta is putting your minimum prices on the website. And the rationale here is you put your minimum prices up to get the tire kickers to go away. The folks that can't even pay their minimum so you don't waste time with them. I would argue there are many ways to screen those people out before you have to take a call with them. And that could be a quick little intake form. Could be. There's a whole bunch of methods to do that. That is not just putting a minimum on on your landing page. I would argue what putting a minimum on your landing page actually does is it will generally trend your client list downward because it attracts the people for whom that price is appealing. And when they come in the door and that's the only number that they've seen, their mind's going to be anchored to that minimum price. I don't want clients paying my minimum price. My minimum is like the lowest threshold at which I will deal with you. And you can certainly set that minimum higher so that like you're still, I guess, happy with your minimum. But wouldn't I rather have somebody at 3x my minimum? So why are we putting minimums out? Like how about like a median sort of client, A range that like you're actually excited for putting the minimums out. If I say starting at. If you think about the distribution of people who are going to come to me and what they would be willing to pay that is most attractive to the part of that distribution of people who's most ready to pay my minimum. That's not what I want. I want to be growing, I want to be moving up. If I think about the client list that I have today, I want to double down on my A clients, right? Who are the folks that are paying top dollar are super happy because I'm solving painful problems. Those people aren't paying the minimum yet. My website is attracting everybody that is paying the minimum. So all that is to say, I don't know, I don't think there's really a perfect answer here. I will say the smart thing about the pricing calculator is, um, it's really only like maybe the bottom 40% where you will give them a price and then everything above that is like, let's talk about it. But we're kind of splitting hairs on that one. Honestly, like this person is doing so much right. If there's one big change to make or one thing to. To invest in, it's probably just continuing to invest in your perceived expertise in the client experience. The things that will impact what folks are willing to pay for you to do that work. If you're time constrained right now, like the shortest path, I see to that. Picking up an offshore bookkeeper to help with some of the heavy lifting there. That's something that man can be such a quality of life improvement. And I've gathered from what they submitted here, they're not excited about hiring a team and having to work with a bunch of people. I'm wired the same way. I ran a big team before. I never want to have to go back to it. I have folks that work for me offshore right now. I think it very much comes down to the style of work that you prefer and the expectation that you set. The people that work for me these days, everything is completely asynchronous. Folks work when they work. They have projects they need to get done that have deadlines. Nobody is meeting live, nobody has expectations of when they have to be on standby and when you have to have back and back conversations. And that's, that's an expectation that we set from day one. For sure. We will sometimes hop on things live and work through things together. But like my company's been set up to work asynchronously. I'm not micromanaging anybody. It's the polar opposite of working in an office environment where everything is synchronous and all the meetings happen live with each other. But we're talking about bookkeeping here. So you build sops you for sure Help and get them up to speed and all that stuff. But you know what's just like magic compared to having to do it yourself is when stuff just happens like that is the beauty of the, the feeling of that person beginning to contribute. And I can speak specifically to working with folks offshore. All of the folks who I've work worked with in my career like offshore, I was a tremendous employer for them. And I could probably largely say the same for offshore people. But I think the level of appreciation is a little different. Like, I don't know if there's an American thing or what, but oftentimes for some reason we think of offshore folks that we're working with very differently from onshore people that we work with. The reality is you can work with someone onshore and change their life by giving them a great job. You can work with people offshore and change their life by giving them a great job. And the financial burden for you to do so is much a much, much lower threshold. Now by doing that, are you somehow depriving an onshore person of, of a great opportunity? I would argue probably no. But that question doesn't even matter. And kind of inherent in that question is the notion that we as humans should be prioritizing humans that live in our country versus humans that live elsewhere. Which I don't really subscribe to that notion anyways. All that is is kind of an endorsement for how, you know, I feel about hiring folks offshore. Not that it is the 100% complete solution for everything that your firm will ever need to get done, but for firms that are 100% onshore, represents a gaping hole and of like opportunity that they should be leaning into. So if I were to boil that down to one thing, it'd probably be making an offshore bookkeeper hire to free up some time so that you can go and invest in that, that kind of perceived level of expertise. Good for you though. Man, what a cool firm. You got a firm, a great one or a stinky one? Man, that's the fun of this. We get the whole spectrum. If you're working for a stinky firm, check the details that you got into the the link in the show notes. We can give some practical advice. There is no such thing as global advice. Everybody's at point A and the best advice is the one that gets you to point B. Not like the over the top maxims that are like the theoretical best thing. It's just about like what's the next thing that I should do. That's always the best, most helpful tip. You got any suggestions for this person? Drop in the comments, share a little knowledge, and I'll see you in the next one. Bye.