270 Standardizing Services - A Guide to Simplification

Day three on the road. We are building out your accounting firm's service library this week. Today we're talking about how to simplify from the weeds of your service items, how to roll up all that information into something more simple that will allow you to build clear sops for your team downstream and also vastly simplify the sales process when it comes to talking about the things that you do. So we'll talk about how to go from that big hot mess of things that you do for clients today, that mess that we rounded up in yesterday's episode to get that, to something more clear cut and simplified so that you're not having to live totally down in those weeds. Come on in, Buckle up. Today, let's simplify. If you're tuning in for the first time this week, probably worth checking out the last couple episodes where we kind of laid the foundation for this, talking about a five tier hierarchy for how to build out a service library in your firm. Whether it's a brand new firm or whether you're a firm that's been around for a while and just has has a big hot mess of things that you do for different people. Always very hard to standardize that stuff. As clients are making special requests and if you're not really intentional, over time, all those things kind of start spreading and getting like more and more different. So the exercise we're doing here is reeling that stuff back in, getting down to something. Founded today, we're talking specifically about service levels and packages. So how to take, you know, a bookkeeping project with kind of all these unique variables and get to maybe our preferred way of delivering that service and how to develop a more simple vernacular around it. So if you remember when we were talking about the different hierarchies of building out your service library, the first tier is packages. This is how we bundle all that stuff, stuff up in a very simplified way to put in front of a client your bronze, silver, gold type of thing. The second tier is service levels. This is like bookkeeping one, bookkeeping two, bookkeeping three, a simplified vernacular for your bookkeeping service that encompasses a collection of things that are lower in that hierarchy, service Items. So bookkeeping 2. My team develops an understanding of, okay, when we say bookkeeping two, here are all the things that we're actually talking about when we say that. And I'll run you through an example of what even just the bookkeeping service was. When I did this exercise in my firm, like the simplified version that we got it to, we went from building a cast practice really quickly and Just kind of doing pretty much anything people would bring us to realizing that was maybe a fine way to make money initially because we had the expertise to do it. But when we wanted to scale that and make something that wasn't totally reliant upon expertise and something that didn't require reinventing the wheel of every single engagement, we started reeling that stuff back in and getting a little more selective. What we landed on for our service levels for bookkeeping. And again, this is just for the bookkeeping Service. We had 12 to 15 different services. I'm just, just referencing the bookkeeping service here. Bookkeeping one for us, we actually referred out. So I've talked before about how we had a partnership with Bench and for the tax clients we had for whom the bookkeeping work didn't rise to the level of where it was really necessary for us to do it, we had a partnership with Bench where we could send folks to Bench. We worked with two or three bench bookkeepers that just worked on our stuff. We could still go in and review it. They were kind of basically just like contract bookkeepers for us, our bookkeeping or casts, because it was more than just bookkeeping engagements. We got to the point where we wouldn't take those unless we could do something, you know, two grand a month or more. And so this Bookkeeping one level basically, if I recall, and it was generally monthly projects for 800 bucks or so or less and rolled up in, that was annual tax prep. It was the bookkeeping. We carried the costs of the bench service we were paying directly to Bench. And so Bookkeeping one was basically, we will review your books annually. You will work directly with a bench bookkeeper to get them the information that they need to do their work. And that was kind of the entry level of us doing bookkeeping for you. Bookkeeping 2 was my team doing the books in house, generally on zero quarterly, with the expected delivery timeframe of the 20th or so. And then for us, bookkeeping three was done on any platform because we had some larger clients where we had to use kind of some more, more legacy platforms that had some industry specific functionality. And these Bookkeeping 3 projects were, were monthly and generally delivered by the 15th of the month. And so Bookkeeping 3 was sort of a catch all for the custom stuff that we did. So rather than throwing all that custom stuff out right away or when we tried to do this simplification, we kind of bucketed it to say beyond this threshold, these are different and these are unique. And over time, the plan was to phase out more of those Custom things. But the first goal initially was just to get our arms around what we had and establish like a common language for how we talk about these projects. So in what I just described, if you've been around this week, you were hearing the service levels, bookkeeping 1, 2 and 3, but also the service items. So example service items for the bookkeeping service that I brought up there, platform is a service item, frequency is a service item, expected delivery date is a service item. And we had some other service items that we were tracking there like accounting method, delivery method. Did they get it over email, loom video, live, live meeting financial statements, specifically which one we included. We have, we had some clients for whom we included a cash flow statement. Other clients where we didn't give them the balance sheet because they were a long ways from understanding that. And so that's an example of additional service items that were, were identified for each of those service tiers. Location tracking was the other one I got jotted down here. So basically class tracking, that was another thing that we tracked. Now for each of those things, let's just talk about speed of delivery, target delivery date, because this is something that clients often have differing preferences on. Does it need to be so locked down that bookkeeping to always delivers on X of the month? Right. Like does it need to be that lockdown? Where I got to is some service items I think ought to be non negotiable but. But it's also fine for some to be negotiable. I and my firm never got to the level of seriousness where it was like we are always just going to do cash basis no matter what because oftentimes we would run into a situation where we had a client cash basis was totally fine. They had some small nuance about what they did over time though that made it so that we should do actually this slightly hybrid version of cash basis. That stuff just happened. And like I, I was never, as I've shared, we're running more of a white glove firm where we would, we were willing to tailor things more for folks as long as they were willing to pay for that. And so we were building a system that was optimized for both standardization and being able to handle, I don't know, I don't want to say a variety but a reasonable diversity of like different ways of getting the work done. But target delivery date, it's a good example of one of those things that you could lock down and make no exceptions on or you could allow for exceptions. If bookkeeping too always delivers on the 15th, maybe you want to lock down that workflow so much that there can't be any exceptions to that. But that's one where I would let people basically buy that down if they wanted to. Some clients had a genuine need where they really needed those, the books to be closed faster. The reality was we couldn't do that for everybody. So we charged a pretty penny to pull that date forward. And that would be an example of a service item that we would allow some flexibility on within the scope of, you know, be it a bookkeeping 2 engagement. If they wanted to pull the delivery up to the seventh, I'm probably just going to charge more for that. But in my systems I have a way of tracking this. This service item in the case of this client is different. It's the 7th, it's not the 15th. Now what did this look like in practice? Like what goes into your practice management system just using that example. So do I just put bookkeeping two into my practice management system for that client? What? Or do I put all of the service items because the delivery date was slightly different? Right. You could do. There's probably two levels of detail that would make the most sense. You could just put the service levels. So let's say I've got a tax client, we do their books, we do bill pay, we do payroll, all that, maybe the whole engagement. Everything I do for them is tax prep one, bill pay one, payroll two, and bookkeeping two. Right. So there's those four services or service levels that we deliver to them and there's going to be fiddly little differences like they want to get it by the 7th of the month or they want to have an in person intake meeting when they drop off their tax stuff, that sort of thing. If that's not part of what is normal for bookkeeping too, for example, then we have to call out that exception in the practice management system. So your level of detail in the PM could just be the service levels you're providing. In that case, there were four of them. I think I listed bookkeeping, tax prep, bill, bill, payroll. You could call out those four and then just any exceptions to the default because those, those service levels define what the default is for bookkeeping to, unless we point out a variation. So in the case of the client that wanted the date pulled forward, I would say Bookkeeping 2 with the exception financials are delivered, you know, by the seventh or something like that, you could do that level of detail. We actually took it to the extreme in our setup. We went to the service item level of detail. So we actually listed beneath the each of their services, like what those service items were. And the reason we set it up this way was to be honestly exceptionally accommodating of doing things different ways. Because it was a multi partner firm that had been around from the beginning, beginning of time. So things were being done in all sorts of imaginatively different ways. And so including that level of detail, the service item detail, instead of just the service level detail, made it easier to accommodate that level of granularity. You may need that, you may not need that. The downsides to that level of detail is it can be a lot of information. One note on this and how you present it and organize it inside of your practice management system. I shared the other day, we had kind of functional groups in our team. So we had two things. We had pods and then we had functional groups. The pods were more how the client relationship was managed and how we did the back and forth with the client. The functional groups were like the machines that were delivering those services. So for example, first functional group we built out was a bookkeeping functional group. And they get all the books done behind the scenes. But then the relationship manager in that pod is the one that does the back and forth with the client. And if I think about the employees sitting in the seat of that, working in that bookkeeping functional group, I don't think 99% of the time they don't need to know that. We do tax planning too for this client. Right. Their job is the bookkeeping. So wherever possible in the pm, try to just include the details that are necessary within the context of the work that's getting done there. So in our case, we had like a bookkeeping space that was organized to just include the details so specific to the bookkeeping engagement, so that when the bookkeepers came in there, they didn't have to like fight through this huge volume of information. It was just the bookkeeping stuff that was relevant to the way that they worked. So if your PM allows for that, that's a good thing to do selectively just to not kind of make that space a mess. Today's episode is sponsored in part by LiveFlow. LiveFlow's the tool that puts a little Louie button up in your spreadsheet app, whether you use Excel or whether you're into Google Sheets, puts a wee little button up there that lets you pull any QuickBooks online data that you have from clients into a spreadsheet. Imagine your spreadsheets now with access to all your client QuickBooks data. How can you use that? Tell you one useful way getting people information who you don't want to be in QuickBooks internal members of a company's team, let's say you got a marketing manager and they're in charge of the marketing budget and need to be overseeing spend or something like that. You want that person in the QuickBooks file? You sure don't. But you know what? I do want them to see marketing spend. It's a great example of like all these barriers and siloed pieces of information that are withheld from team members just because we maybe didn't have a good way to give them access to it. If the business owner is responsible for a set of KPIs, all of those KPIs need to be tied back to team members. Where team members are like, okay, they have to do this, this and this. Or a collection of team members have to meet their goals in order for the business owner's KPIs to get to where they need to be. Or well, how do we get really clear information to those team members? Access to the data that they need and as you're advising clients, LifeFlow is a great way to carve up all of the data that lives inside of QuickBooks. Either pull out one time snapshots or reports that will continue syncing live on an ongoing basis and then all I'm doing is I'm giving that person access to a spreadsheet, not the keys to the entire kingdom. Right. Besides, QuickBooks got all sorts of like user limits and I'm consuming those every time I add a person. Anyways, Lifelo does a whole bunch of stuff consolidations as well. That's one cool use case you want to learn more, check out the link in the show notes today's episode sponsored in part by TeamUp. The folks that go out and find you amazing hires for your team in the Philippines. More knowledge bombs from Teamup. We talked before about how the top mistake firms make when it comes to hiring people Offshore is treating them as like this other part of their team. When hiring folks offshore is just kind of like adding one more member to your remote team, they really aren't any different. Mistake number two is making all this mental math around building an Offshore team just more complicated than it needs to be. At the end of the day, you're hiring people, you're developing people, you're training people to do a thing. And whether they're offshore or onshore, man, that doesn't really look any different. I know firms whose most senior technical people are offshore. I know firms who actually Use offshore folks in a bunch of client facing roles. I know I've shared. I hired a bunch of offshore people when I was running my firm and I came into it with all of the, I don't know, like, ignorant, embarrassing questions that you would expect to have not having done it before. And very quickly it became clear my team actually had all those concerns too. They were kind of spooked about the notion of us pulling in offshore folks very quickly as these new hires were just part of our team and in our meetings and all that, everybody's like, oh, this is actually fantastic. We've been looking for people that can do this stuff for a long time and not being able to make those hires onshore. Or we've been talking about, you know, this person wanting to move into something more valuable, but it means giving up the tasks that they have and trying to find someone who can take that stuff over. Man, offshore hiring was a godsend for us. Don't overthink it. They're people. Team up can help you find awesome peeps. You pay Team up a one time recruiting fee. That's it. Nothing ongoing. That person's just part of your team now. Learn more about that one. Check out the link down in the show notes. If you tuned in yesterday, the goal yesterday was to just capture like all of the different ways that we do things for our clients. And I'll run you a quick, run you through a quick example of how to get from there to defining your service levels. I already gave you the example of what service levels I landed on in my firm. But I'll just run you through a hypothetical kind of beginning to end how you would build out. Just say what your bookkeeping 1, 2, 3 would look like. And you can have any number of service levels. You could have bookkeeping 1 through 10. I would argue though that the more that you have, the, the less or the more complex that like shared vernacular of what it means becomes. I can remember what bookkeeping 1, 2 and 3 mean if I have 10, I don't know that I can remember that off the top of my head. And I kind of create some added friction I think, when you're talking about it. So first you gotta define what your service items are that you're tracking. And those service items go into each service level. So bookkeeping one is a unique set of service items. And the example I gave you from my firm, it was, you know, service items were. Who's doing the books? Bench. What accounting platform is it on? Bench? How frequently is it done? Annually, these Are all examples of service items that define how we deliver the service. So the first thing for you to define is what are our service items within our bookkeeping service deliverable? Look at stuff like frequency, accounting, platform accounting method. The report package that's delivered, like is that just coming outta QuickBooks or is it another reporting system? The delivery method. Am I emailing a PDF? Am I, am I calling them? Am I sending a loom delivery? The close speed which financial statements are included. The spreadsheet template that's in the show notes. For every single top level service, we've got bookkeeping and like 10 or 12 others. For every single top level service I've outlined the most common service items I think you'll see in a given service and then some additional like maybes for bookkeeping. Those are kind of the most common things that I see. And then you can augment that according to maybe some special or specific things you do for your clients. Or if you're like all we ever do is send QuickBooks reports. Like I don't even need that level of complexity in here. If that's all you ever do, then great, you don't need the report package service item, right? So adjust that to what makes sense for how you deliver work to your clients. But just run through an example of how you could set up a bookkeeping 1, 2 and 3 service level. Bookkeeping 1 frequency could be quarterly. Platform QBO accounting method, cash report package basic let's just, let's just call whatever comes out of QuickBooks basic delivery method, email speed the 25th of the month financial statements, the balance sheet and p and l bookkeeping 2 frequency goes from quarterly to monthly. Platform still QBO accounting method cash report package still basic delivery method is a loom. Now I'm going to send them a video to explain it. With each financial statement, delivery Speed is the 15th of the month. Now faster was the 25th of the month at Bookkeeping 1 and for the financials we're sending balance sheets p and l bookkeeping 3 still monthly. Any platform. That was kind of our approach because we had clients on weird sort of other platforms that we decided we were willing to support but only at like that bookkeeping 3 level which is more involved, more expensive accounting method. Accrual instead of cash report package, something out of a reporting system like a fathom or a reach or a spotlight Delivery method is loom speed is 10th of the month and then the financial statements, the balance sheet, the P and L. But now they're getting a statement of cash flows as well. So that's a hypothetical bookkeeping 1, 2, 3. And we're going to build out these service levels for all of the top level services that you provide, be it, you know, bill pay or payroll. Receipt management is one that you definitely need to think through. Almost everyone providing any level of bookkeeping service is doing some version of receipt management, whether we're explicitly calling it out or not. As soon as a client sends you a receipt, you're delivering a receipt management service. What's the expectation when they send that thing to you? Is it that you will store those things forever and they can come back and ask you for, hey, can you give me that gas receipt from three years ago? Is it that you're organizing it a specific way in a system that they have access to? Is the expectation that you are to follow up with them if there's any transactions for which you don't have receipts? As why as soon as they give you a receipt, like, you have to define, here's what our receipt management service is. And I can help the client understand because they don't know how to ask this question. I can help them understand what my level one service, level two service, and level three services. And you don't have to, you don't have to communicate it. 1, 2, 3. You can say, you know, here's a few different options. In fact, this is just a fantastic example of the value of getting explicit about. Here are the different things and the different levels we do for people because something like receipt management, most clients have never seen a good version of well, what, what should I do? And you don't want to let the blind lead the advisor here and totally leave it in their hands because you are going to be better positioned to recommend the right thing that they need than, than they will be. Right? So I would, you know, with something like receipt management, I kind of come to them and be like, hey, I'd recommend you either do this or this. These are kind of, these are two of the flavors of this that we do. Here's why I would recommend these specifically for your business. Instead of them being like, can I send you receipts? And you're like, sure. And that's it. And so there is no clear expectation. And then the next client does the same thing and they have a different expectation or a different staff person is doing the work, so they're organizing it a different way. Like this is the value of getting explicit about how we do each of these services. So there's an example of building out like a bookkeeping 1 2, 3. But if you did the exercise yesterday where everybody chucks all the random stuff that they do for clients up on, you know, a whiteboard or whatever it is, what do I do with all the random one off stuff that I do for people? The client who, you know, wants their books faster, like we mentioned, the one that you don't send a balance sheet to because it just never leads to a productive conversation. Right? The one with this weirdo sort of one off hybrid accounting method. What I recommend here is basically just having a text field in your practice management system, either at the service level level or at the service item level. That is like a catch all for any exceptions from the default. So if we have bookkeeping too, and everybody understands what that means, just have a text field somewhere, that's a catchphrase, a catch all for any exceptions to that. There's a, there's a balancing act here where you're like, should I add a service item for this thing that I do? And if you only do it for one client, the answer is no, you shouldn't do that. Like we're trying to get that service item list shorter over time so there's fewer variables. And so rather than trying to like classify every little thing that we do for a client that's a one off thing, just use a text field. If you want to go really lean on your service items and not have very many at all, then maybe it means you're putting a lot of stuff in a text field. But without this framework, what people are effectively doing is just having one big text field or one SOP to track everything that we do for a client. And frankly, that's the best case scenario. Like the reality is most of us, the person that does that work has that text field in their head. It hasn't even been captured anywhere, right? So this exercise of building out level one, two and three, do this for all of your top level services. So just to remind you of the top level services we built out in the, the spreadsheet in the show notes. And it's kind of a collection of the most common things that firms do for people, but by no means should be complete or totally match what you do. Bookkeeping, cleanup, bookkeeping, tax prep, 1099 prep, business personal property tax returns, tax planning, invoicing, that's on the accounts receivable side. Payroll, bill pay, receipt management, document management, entity management, advisory, like vcfo, tech advisory, sales tax, cash reporting, any of those top level services that you do, you're going to go through the process of Defining what is service level? 1, 2, 3. You may have situations where there's just a single service level and that's fine. That's actually great. If you can get to the point where you've simplified it to that degree, then that's awesome. That may be, you know, it may be a goal where on the tax prep side or the bookkeeping side or something like that, it's necessary to have several kind of tiers of hierarchy. Maybe for other things like receipt management that you're less excited about. You're like, we're going to do one flavor of this and that's it. Like, this is the only version of it that we're going to do. But you still have to define that one. Whatever it is, like, here's the scope of what we do and don't do. This episode is sponsored in part by Maker's Hub. I freaked some people out recently saying the biggest thing AI is set to change in the next six months. 1040 prep workflows. The reason? AI vision models. It's the same tech that Maker's Hub is built on that in my opinion could revolutionize how accounts payable happens. Recently did a demo day on my channel in the first 10 days. Actually the most watched video I've ever done about how AI is automating accounts payable. Maker's Hub is using AI vision models to pull information off of invoices in wildly detailed ways. So, so much better than anything OCR could have ever done before. Finally delivering on the promise that we can stop doing manual entry on this stuff. Right? I mean, it feels like for, for over a decade we've been having apps coming and telling us, you know, we've finally eliminated manual entry. It actually feels like we're pretty darn close to that. For the first time I had clients with super hairy AP workflows where this genuinely would have replaced like several FTEs probably in my firm in like the very best way. Because for every single one of these people we had a hundred other things that we wanted them to do. Super cool app. You'll see them out and about at accounting conferences. I'll put a link to them in the show notes if you want to see a quick 5 minute demo. Just search makers hub JSON stats on YouTube. We've done two of them now and they're pretty cool. Today's episode is sponsored in part by client Hub Time machine. The year was 2017ish 2018. I was running a cast practice and we had all of our task management stuff happening in ClickUp and it was fine for managing tasks but the big headache. Every single month I had stuff that I needed my client to do so that I could do my work and we had our system all nailed down. But when it came to having to get the clients to do that stuff, just a bunch of freaking emailing and following up and so so annoying. And I literally remember telling the team, can't we just like give our clients access to this ClickUp or just create a ClickUp that we can both use together? My clients know how task management systems are work. They use them themselves. Gang. If you have ever said that Client Hub was created around that idea. A two sided task management platform. Not some funky old nasty like portal that's been bolted on to a practice management system, but genuinely a task management system that actually looks pretty much the same on the client side. And on your side you got a bunch more firm tooling. But on the client side it looks like a beefed up task manager management system. Literally a spot where you can collaborate with clients and work through things together. Because unfortunately there's oftentimes still stuff I need clients to do. Questions come up. I want to push those out through their task management system and we could just manage this stuff like grownups, okay? Not all this email and back and forth and having to remember and it's something the client Hub does really really well. Client Hub is a full practice management system. But if you've ever been looking for something that is going to feel more premium to your clients like, like a proper modern task management system could be the solution for you. I'll put more info about Client Hub down in the show. Notes. One other thing I want to call out before getting to this, how this affects the sales process. Something specific to tax prep. If you're a. If you're a tax shop and you're thinking how do I define all the service items that make one tax return different from another tax return? The main things to look out for are variables in the client experience. So things like do they always want to sit down and meet? Do they complete, you know, the organizer? If you have some version of that when I deliver it, are they going to be offended if I don't invite them into the office to sit down and talk with me and go over it when it's done. Be thinking about about service items specifically that impact the client experience and the downstream workflow as it goes through your team. It's not realistic to build a perfect collection of service items that reflect every type of variability that can be In a tax return. Right. That's not realistic. Something that I'll explore in a later podcast episode is two ways you could wade into this a bit. One version of this that we did was basing, you know, some sort of complexity on past billings, basically dropping them into one of five buckets. In our case, the fifth bucket was like a catch all for everything over X. That's one way of doing this. Another way that we did this and so that would be a single service item under tax prep. Another way that we did this that I liked a little better is a basic grading for complexity of a tax return. The way that I use this in my firm, and I won't go too deep on it here, we basically had a, a complexity system where given a certain set of factors, it would either be a 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5. And the 5 is the catch all of every, you know, complexity beyond a certain threshold. So for example, level one was a single state tax return with only W2 stuff like no, not I itemizing like as, as basic as you can get basically. And we could use that as a service item. The way that I actually used that was re. That was really valuable was to ensure that the right complexity of work was going to the right team member so that I don't have super senior people cherry picking the really easy stuff. And then the opposite, you have really new people like unknowingly grabbing something really complex. So on the prep side, that's how we used it. It's also really valuable on the review side. The hardest person to find is a technical tax reviewer. And oftentimes preparers are afraid to cross over that threshold and start doing review. So we eventually made review non negotiable. Everybody did review. And by having a complexity scale for those returns, if you are basically approved to prep up to level two, you could review up to level one. So when the expectation of everyone was that you're doing review to some degree, it demystified review and gave them like a linear way to step up into more complex work. It also kept our most senior folks working on the most complex stuff that they really needed to be working on. I'll do an episode on that down the road because we actually did a version of this for month end closes as well. And who could prep them and who could review them. It was a really nice like stair step approach to, to baby step team members into more complex things rather than like them working for a decade and then somebody just saying, okay, you're now approved to do this really hard technical Thing. Right. So it was a more, more sort of linear progression that took the fear out of doing review because that is a spooky thing and feels really high stakes if you've never done it before. Okay, uh, the sales process, last thing we're going to touch on here, those service levels. Bookkeeping, 1, 2, 3, receipt management 1, 2, 3. When you're selling, those service levels get rolled up into a package. So you know, a package that I propose to a client could be bookkeeping to bill pay 1, tax prep 3, and that is a package. Sometimes people will present multiple packages for clients to choose from. Bronze, silver, gold. An upside of that approach is you can actually use decoy pricing to actually get a little bit more money out of those packages by making one of them look like a really good deal, the one that you want them to go to. The main downside of packages in my mind is that I'm a know it all and that I know what you need better than you do. And do I really want to leave it in their hands to decide, here's what I need when I'm the expert. So that's probably the main downside to giving them several packages. But either way, a package is what's presented to the client and that's a collection of services defined by their service level. And in my proposal system, in a perfect world, what I'm setting up here is as soon as that proposal is accepted, those service levels are then task templates in my practice management system. So somebody accepts a proposal with bookkeeping two in it, boom, spawn the task template and your task management system that is all things bookkeeping two, both the ongoing work and what onboarding tasks look like for bookkeeping too. I can't tell you how incredibly helpful this was for my sales process to get people using the same language and talking about the things we do rather than making it up on the fly. As soon as you bring other people into the sales process, this becomes a nightmare. It's a huge problem with multi partner firms when everyone is selling different types of dog food and then it all goes back to the same team to complete it. And you're like, oh well, Jim always has it done this way and, and Tina always has it done this way. That's just, that's a mess. And even in my experience, working with like some legacy partners who just kind of wanted to do things their own way, they actually, once they got their head around the service library approach, actually appreciated the simplicity of having that sort of database in their head and being able to Draw from that in client conversations. So just having that structure will make those sales conversations more explicit. And the other amazing thing that it enabled in my practice, I've shared a number of times before that our largest source of year over year revenue was actually upsells and increases in scope in our existing clients. We were adding new clients for sure, but the biggest driver of new revenue was more revenue from existing clients. And the biggest thing that kicked this off was building this service library because we now have a linear progression that anyone in my team can understand of how to get a client from A to B, of how, how to upgrade, how to add a service that compliments another service. So some examples, linear upsells just through a given service. Let's say the owner's really busy, but they're still doing retirement contributions. Or maybe they screwed one up. Propose going from payroll two to payroll three, where you do the payroll, the retirement contributions for them. Maybe at level three, the employees get direct, direct access to a member of your team so they can ask questions about pay stubs or how to use the payroll platform, something like that. If you got a time strapped, time strapped owner, they're going to love that. So that's an example of like a linear upgrade from Payroll to payroll 3. Tax planning one to tax planning two. And my firm, we just had two levels of tax planning. Tax planning one was a single review at the end of the year. Tax planning two was two reviews, one mid year one end of the year. If somebody's on tax planning one, they get to the end of the year, oh, a pile of money or something, and don't have any time to course correct. Boy, that's a great time to have the conversation about going to tax planning two. I, I did that all the time. There was the progression of clients through tax planning was like, hey, you just had a brutal April, let's do a better job planning next year. And they're like, yep, yep, yep, gotta do that. So we plan at the end of the year. Maybe that goes fine the first year, but eventually they're like, oh man, I still don't have a ton of time to plan. Just doing tax planning at the end of the year. And so I'm like, great, let's go to tax planning too. Now we're gonna do it twice a year. These services, like the different levels give you a very clear path to be able to do that. Not just you, who's probably the most savvy person on your team about doing this, but also the rest of your team who isn't quite as savvy. So that that's like a linear progression. Another really interesting thing here is considering for any given service and service level, what is the peanut butter to that service's jelly? What are the ones that go hand in hand? So tax prep, for example, let's say people in tax prep one, they have very basic tax returns. It's hard to justify tax planning. But people in tax prep two, maybe they ought to have tax planning like tax planning one, people in tax prep three, where they have more complex needs, Almost certainly they need some planning, right? So I can literally run a list of my clients of who are the prep levels I'm doing, what, what are the prep levels I'm doing for all of my clients? And then who has planning and who doesn't? Like, that's really valuable, right? Bookkeeping one, maybe the client could get by without receipt management there. But at bookkeeping two or three, maybe they really need receipt management. Maybe at tax planning too, they would benefit from advisory because they're starting to get used to kind of having those advising conversations with you. Maybe the bill pay service would benefit from the cash reporting service. That was how almost all my cash reporting engagement started, was I did bill pay with them and they loved giving up control of the bill pay, but didn't like not having visibility into, you know, cash burn and how much money they're gonna have over the next couple of weeks. So almost all of my cash reporting engagements started with bill pay. And so we had this, this cross sell opportunity. It was peanut butter and jelly. Those things went, went really well together. And for accountants who may be normally uncomfortable about having the sales conversation, if you can literally show them a table of here's all my service levels and here are other things that go really well with it, and in one or two lines, how you communicate that, that's not only giving you a clearer path to doing those, but your team as well, which I would argue is an even bigger opportunity. All right, I think that's all I got for today. Tomorrow we're going a little deeper on how this stuff comes to life in SOPs and how you standardize procedures around these different services that we now have. If before we had to build standard operating procedures by the client engagement, where somebody walked through here all the things we do for this client, now we're abstracting that to the service, to where we're now building SOPs for services or service levels so that once I have an SOP for what bookkeeping two means, man, I can go do that a hundred times. And the next time we bring on a client doing that, everybody knows what that means. In fact, we can do it more efficiently. We can do it with less skilled people, because we're not relying on expertise to read between the lines and figure out what's needed. That's going to be the focus of tomorrow, building out those SOPs and how you do that in the context of this hierarchy we've been talking about. That's it for today. Thanks for coming and hanging. Keep the questions coming down in the comments along the way. If you've got that question, without a doubt somebody else has got it too. So drop that down below if you have any. I'll see you tomorrow.