273 The Unlocks That Changed My Business

They're things that maybe you didn't think were possible. Maybe there was an assumption that got in the way, but now that you know it's possible. Oh, is that exciting. I jotted down 16 instances of this that I've encountered in my professional career. I would love to hear yours as well. I'm going to run you through them today. Maybe some you've gone through, some you haven't, but every single one of them changed the way I approach my work. Get in here. Pull up a seat. Stop talking. It's Jason Daly. Foreign. Breaking moments. What we're talking about today. Leverage unlocks ChatGPT. Give me more alliterations like leverage unlocks breakthrough benefits. Success sparks Growth gains. These are pretty good momentum makers. Catalyst changes. Profit. Propellers. Propellers. What did we do before AI Revenue rockets. Oh, my gosh. What did we do before AI okay, eyes on the prize. Here's my top 16 revenue rockets. They're not revenue rockets. They're just like mental kind of unlocks. Number one man. The first time somebody pays you to do their work and you're like, yeah, I guess I thought that I knew how to do this, but you're actually gonna cut me a check for this? Some of us are wired to always be on a path to being self employed someday. Some of us are not. And that's totally fine. The first time somebody just cut me a check and I'll be honest. So I bought a firm that had a team of 40 and. And there was a lot of that money filtered through a whole lot of things before it ever came to me, and it usually didn't. And me then going out on my own at that, I had never launched something from scratch myself. Going out on my own and building this content business and all of that, that was a very different experience. The first time somebody like gave me money for a sponsorship or joined the community or something like that, that one just hit different. And it's a moment where you're like, yeah, you know, I guess I always kind of thought that this would be possible, but now it's actually happening. There's actually other human being that see me as valuable. That's something you just don't forget, I think. Second one I had. First time someone wants you to sign by tax return. I started out doing tax prep and I whew. I sent a whole lot of stinkers through a review before anyone ever asked me to sign a tax return myself. And it's one of those things where the first time you do it, you realize, oh, so this is all the smarter that people feel when they get to this point, turns out they've been faking it all along, just like me. And there's something reassuring about that. There's also something terrifying about that. But once I was on the other side of that, a whole lot more actually became possible for me. Cause I looked around and I'm like, okay, well I thought there was just something I didn't know about all this. But now I see that other people are kind of just going through it like I am. And oftentimes it's a confidence thing. It's not even like a technical ability thing, it's a self belief so sort of thing. Third, revenue rocket. First time someone says that a thing you did changed their life. And I'm thinking through the business context here. I remember the first time that happened in my firm. I remember that first time that happened in my content business. And both times it was just like a splash of cold water in the face to be like, oh, there's a reason why I'm doing what I'm doing. Because it actually is a really meaningful thing for people that can truly change their life. And sometimes you get so mired and the meat and potatoes of doing that stuff, it's accounting, right? Oh Gosh, you make YouTube videos, cool. Get a job. You get so mired in the meat and potatoes of doing that stuff that you lose perspective of like this stuff is like you're doing something incredibly valuable for someone. Fourth. I've shared this one before. My first offshore hire. Honestly, it was such a big tipping point for me. My first offshore hire. Still remember her name. I probably shouldn't, I probably shouldn't say it. She was so good. And the time it took from trying to find that hire to her starting was less than three weeks. Never in my life had I been able to find somebody to do a job that fast. And I very quickly realized, oh my gosh, she's really good too. Nevermind the fact that for the cost of this person, I would have had to hire an onshore person. That was probably 5x the cost and probably not any better. Maybe I just got lucky. But my hit rate with offshore hires was way better than my hit rate with on onshore hires. How long they stuck around, I don't think it's totally luck. I think there's a different level of appreciation and willingness to like, you know, it was coming into the cast practice. So some of that stuff was repetitive work. And my hit rate on onshore hires, like being around after the first few years Just wasn't as high as offshore. Anyways. First time I did that, I was like, okay, I have this distributed team that's all over across the country. Cause I'd already been hiring people off of Twitter. But when I made that offshore hire, I'm like, wait a minute. This is just another human being. I have made this much harder than it needs to be. That was a big one for me. Number five, the first time someone works the night shift for you, this is actually pretty novel. Some offshore groups work like US time zone hours, some work their local time zone hours. And even folks you employ over there will have different preferences of which they would rather do. More commonly with, in my experience, Indian offshore groups, they work the local hours. And it's really wild to get a project to a certain point, hand it off to somebody and then come back in the morning and somebody has been working all night on it. You're like, wait a minute, what work can happen during these hours? And then you're like, ooh, how can I, how can I game this so that the work never stops and we can turn things around incredibly fast? It is interesting and it's a cool thing to think about, but that speed of turnaround, if it's necessary, usually it means you're doing other things wrong. But I will tell you, like, it is really nice to get to the end of the workday, shoot a little two minute loom, and be like, hey, can you work on this? And then the next time you turn up to work, like, somebody's taking care of a whole bunch of that stuff for you and you didn't even have to wait for them. Next up, the first time an employee does a thing for you, the first time you delegate and you're like, I could get used to this. That thing got done and I didn't have to do it myself. Now next one a little more interesting. First time an employee does something better than you would, where you're like, oh, dang, I didn't think about that. Maybe I should actually delegate that stuff a little sooner because other people might have ideas besides me, which leads me to the next one. The first time something just gets done without you having to dictate the whole process. The first time it goes from your idea to, oh, it's a thing now, and I didn't have to will it all into existence 100% myself. If you are of the entrepreneurial mindset, if you hang out in spaces like this, boy, you got a odds are you got a whole lot of ideas bumping around in that noggin. And where those ideas go to die is when we don't tell anybody about them or when we write them down and we're like, oh, yeah, I'm totally going to plan this thing out, roll it out. I'm going to make it happen. And about 10% of the time, you actually follow through on that. The other 90%, the reality is, had you handed that off to somebody else, even if they didn't do it perfectly like you would have, somebody else could have gotten at 80% there, which almost certainly would have been better than the 0% there that you got it to. I think we wait generally too long to pull other people in to a process. I was shooting a main channel video the other day. Oh, it was the. I don't even remember what one it is. Where am I right now? At the end of the video, it was kind of like a big picture, like, brain concept video. And at the end of the video, I was like, you might be super, super into this and totally bought in, but now you're stuck on, well, heck, this is such an outside the box idea. How am I ever gonna get my team plugged into this? And I was like, start by sending them this video. And whoa, for every main channel video that's like that, there's probably three podcasts that are like that, where you're like, huh, that may be a good idea. Maybe we should explore that. And then nothing happens because you don't delegate it to someone else. The reality is we can kind of build ourselves up a little too much sometimes and think that that hundred percent is really, really important. When just giving it to somebody else and even getting it 50% of the way there or giving it to somebody else and ends up being 120%, that's usually the move. And if you're the big boss, that's kind of your job, if you run a team, is not to run everything through yourself. Today's episode, it is sponsored in part by liveflow. Liveflow is an extension for your spreadsheet app, Excel, Google Sheets, whatever you use that lets you pull live QuickBooks data from client files into your spreadsheet. So your spreadsheet had a baby with QuickBooks. Now, how can you use that? How about to get the client to quit sniffing around in QuickBooks where they don't belong? Okay, stop touching stuff. The moment they start fumbling around in there, you get concerned they're gonna break something. But also they're absolutely hopeless when it comes to getting to the information that they actually need. Which is why using Live Flow to build like custom reporting the stuff that your clients actually want to see in a concise view. Super, super valuable. And as I've shared before, can actually take the pressure off of the month end close as well. Because when I send those financials to my client, they're like, this is cool. I guess it means the work's done. But I've got no idea how to use this information. So instead I'm going to give them like a real time set of reports that live inside of this spreadsheet. I give them access to the spreadsheet. I'm keeping them out of QuickBooks. They're not asking about the monthly financials. Everybody wins, right? Sounds like a home run to me. Learn more about Lifelong Link in the show Notes Today's episode is sponsored in part by the folks at Team up who help you find talented accountants in the Philippines. Join your team Education Break Common vernacular you hear when you're hiring offshore bpo. What is a bpo? BPO is a business process outsourcing company. Basically a company that employs a bunch of folks offshore and then you hire the company to get part or all of those people's time. The appeal of a BPO is for folks that haven't done offshoring before. Sometimes this can feel like maybe a more comfy place to start can help you navigate, you know, kind of cultural misunderstandings. Usually the BPO will do the actual recruiting and bring a bunch of folks to you. Some BPOs also sell you more like the product the deliverable, not the time. So like buying tax returns or month end closes instead of just having a person that works for you around the clock. But there's some downsides to BPOs as well, namely high ongoing fees. It's not uncommon for half of what you pay to the BPO to actually go to the BPO and the other half to go to the person. The BPO is usually going to set the person's schedule as well who's working for you. So you lose a little bit of control. And if you ever wanted to leave the bpo, getting those staff to come with you and like getting them out of the bpo, in my experience is virtually impossible. So you kind of stuck with that BPO if you love the people that you have at the BPO. So upsides and downsides to BPOs. But if you want to do direct hiring, that's what today's sponsored Team up does. They've got recruiters that'll find you awesome folks to join your team you pay a one time recruiting fee, they don't pay anything after that. Those folks just work for you directly. There you go. Now you're a BPO expert. If you're looking to hire folks directly in the Philippines, check out team up link down in the show notes. Next up, along the same lines, first time you hire someone smarter than you, that's a big one. I actually think most small business owners go through their years never hiring someone with expertise beyond the expertise that they have. Like they come into it having to figure everything else out themselves and then they hire people under them as opposed to, hey, here's this thing that we want to go do. Could we go hire somebody that already has this expertise that can shortcut it for us and do it better than I would be able to do it today? But for whatever reason, most of us don't think this way. We don't think of hiring as a way of adding expertise. And maybe it's the fear of doing something or selling a service that you can't deliver yourself. Because what if we bring that person in and then we leave? How are we ever going to deliver that service? We started in this very humble place where you were only selling the things that you could do. And to ever move beyond that might be scary, but the problem then is your business is always gonna be subject to like your own limitations. You're never gonna be able to season what you're capable of with what other really talented people are capable of. There may be an element of, you know, not valuing the stuff that we don't know and we don't understand. So we only look for other people that are like us and have expertise that we can comprehend. When oftentimes what you need is the opposite, is the person that could be the peanut butter to your jelly and do all the things that you can't do. But we don't always have the same level of appreciation for that. And maybe it's just because we've kind of got this self centered lens of the important things are the things that I understand, right? But that can be a real trap. The first time someone else closes a client. This was a biggie for me. I'm like, wait a minute, we can add new revenue without me or one of my partners being the one to do it. I remember the first time we pulled the staff into this. I, I had kind of hit the realization where I'm like, all right, to date, I've been bringing in clients that are good for me and I can vibe with them and they can get excited about what I say and how that ties into my expertise. But the trap with that was that I then always had to be involved in the engagement because to a degree, it was tied to my expertise. So I kind of started going down the path of working with software development companies. I gotten referred a few really good clients, and they were really profitable, and I loved working with them. It was actually really, really fun. And. And I'm like, cool, I'm gonna go down this path. But then I realized where I was going was a path that was not going to be doing the client work. It was going to be managing the firm itself, attracting talent, strategy, that sort of thing, positioning of the firm as a whole. And as much as I loved working with those types of clients, it was the last thing I needed. Clients that I had to hold the hand of, even though they were, like, cool, impressive clients and big clients for our firm, I had to accept the fact that the clients we needed were the ones that my team could bring on. And, man, the first time we landed that plane where this pretty good client comes in, and I'm like, actually, team like, you can handle this. And that client came in and started paying us, and they didn't even know that I existed. That was a big unlock. As we talk about, if you're running a team, as we talk about the dimension of can we find like a revenue threshold or something like that below which. Where I don't need to be involved, where I can be like, all right, I see every engagement below this threshold. If I just washed my hands of them and delegated to somebody else and it did all go sideways, it's so small. I can see it wouldn't be all that consequential to the business. That's a. That's, to me, is like a helpful framework to. To get you to maybe remove yourself from that client work if that's a struggle for you. Because a little baby step one where it's not the end of the world if it does go sideways, usually what happens is you get in there and everything goes fine. Oftentimes things go bad better because the rest of the team can be more attentive than you when you're spread too thin. And so when you have that positive experience, you're like, oh, we can take this further. Like, let's change the threshold to this. We've talked about that before, kind of on the fulfillment side, the same thing is true on the sales side. What if there was a certain profile of project maybe beyond a certain threshold? Or in A domain that's not your expertise that you could leave to someone else. You can still give them a bunch of help behind the scenes, but that's gonna be their responsibility. Man, that gave me such peace to know that I could remove myself from the sales process and, and new clients would keep coming in. I think it was like a self part of it was like a self centered sort of thing. Where could I have closed more business than my team maybe. But I think I probably project onto that more importance than I actually have in the process and don't take into account the positives and what other people have to add to the process. You know, like there was a day when I took my first sales meeting too. And to be able to invest in those people to develop and do the same, that's a great opportunity. The first time you sell a digital product online, that's a pretty wild drug. As people who run service businesses, we're used to this linear relationship between what we can bill people and the human inputs that are required in general. Like even if you're value billing and recurring pricing, all that stuff, by and large, when you take on a new client, like there's going to be human inputs. But the first time you sell a digital product online and you're like, man, I just made that thing and someone bought it. And that's pure profit. It's pretty wild. And it, it's actually really helpful to get you outside of the mental framework that is, you know, the traditional professional services billable hour or the effective hourly rate that you're trying to get to whatever that number is. If I can get somebody to effectively pay 400 bucks for an hour of my time, could I instead get 10 people to buy a thing from me for $40 or 20 people to buy a thing from me For $20? Or one person to buy a thing from me for$400 or three? I'm just kidding, I won't keep doing that. Oftentimes when you zoom out and you think about it that way, you're like, yeah, you know, like I probably could. The big blocker there for most of us is going to be maybe, no, you don't see an immediate path to that. But the problem is you have to first sell one thing to one person for $20 before you're ever going to get to selling 10,000 things, you know, to people for $1,000. So you got to start somewhere. But the beauty of selling products is when that stuff builds, it's not subject to the same like linear kind of trajectory of human inputs that are required to continue selling more products. Big opportunity here if you are in like a specialized kind of niche. Little pocket. In fact I got a cool story I'm gonna share on this. I'll save it for tomorrow. Of someone who built a super cool product business with a very small following. 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 work. They use them themselves. And 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 onto 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 management system. Literally a spot where you can collaborate with clients and work 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 that 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 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. 10:40 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 100 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 five minute demo, just search makers hub Jason Stats on YouTube. We've done two of them now and they're pretty cool. Up next, the first time someone buys something from you who you have never talked to, this unknown name comes through, somehow knows you and gives you money and that's it. And you never talk with them. Maybe that's a service business thing where you're just used to having to talk to people and do onboarding and, and all of that. But when somebody buys something from you for the first time, you have no idea who they are, where they come from, and you will never talk to them. That's pretty wild. It's pretty great for, frankly, if you're an introvert like me. Up next, the first time you're invited to speak at a thing, they're like, we think you'd be good at this. That could be a live event, could be a webinar. It's another one of those moments where you're like, oh, is this how smart you feel when you do these things? Because I don't feel as smart as all those people look. But that's a great exercise to go through because you see the world in a different light and realize, yeah, no, everybody's kind of just making it up too. I had this one a few times in my firm. This next one, the first time someone already knows you or already knew who you were before you had your first conversation. So they've listened to you on a podcast, they've seen you and this and that. The first time I experienced this was during COVID and we started putting out like these sort of emergency webinars. I'd never done a webinar in my life. And I said, I have an idea. Let's do a webinar about COVID Relief when things were really hitting the fan, just to get information out in a higher leverage way. So we're not having all these one on one calls. Like 300 people turn up to me just sweating my little buns off in front of a webcam and all I see is number of participants. And if you've ever done a webinar solo by yourself, it is such a bizarre thing to be talking to your computer, your camera and like, yeah, evidently there's a whole bunch of people on the other side of this watching it. We did that. It went really well. We did them fairly regularly when we were in like the heat, like early days of COVID and it was like really kind of day to day. And a couple months later, we got a few clients where they're like, we've been on all your webinars. We already know who you are. And like, there's just a totally different, more sort of familial like way that you interact with those people when they already know the vibe. Now if you create content or if you have a newsletter, a podcast, or anything like that, and people have already built a relationship with you, the first thing everybody says, this is so weird. It feels like I already know you. Or it's so weird to like hear you voice your voice, like you're actually talking right now. Like, that's the first thing everybody says to me when I, when I meet them irl. But when you take on a client that already has that relationship with you, that asymmetric relationship where they know you and you don't know them, you realize what a hack it is. Can it be abused? Absolutely. I mean, umpteen influencers who have scammed people out of all sorts of money. But if you're doing this the right way, when those people come into your firm, man, they trust your expertise like none other. And that's just such an awesome place to bring somebody in. At two more. The first time a prospect thinks your YOLO price, you know the option that you gave them, that's like, there's no way anybody's gonna pay this or I'm way too busy. I don't actually want this client, so I'm just gonna give him a ridiculous price. The first time a prospect thought that that was cheap, I can remember when that happened to Me. And I realized later that I was missing some important context that I needed to gather from clients down the road. In this case it was that the client was coming from a way bigger firm where they were paying about 4x as much for service that wasn't as good as what we deliver. And at the time I was like swamped. I'm like, man, do I really want this right now? I quoted like 2x what I would normally charge for this thing. And they're like, oh yeah, this is a no brainer. And I'm like, pardon me, excuse me. And this client was no different than a whole ton of other clients that I had. The only thing that was different was their past experience and their perceived value of what I did. And that was such a light bulb moment for me where I was like, oh my gosh, I just need to find a hundred more people like this and I can cut like 500 legacy projects. And so we started like actively thinking about how do we get, you know, we've got this mid sized firm nearby us that's kind of in flames. How do we get some of those folks over here where they're unfortunately are getting really bad client service, but paying a lot more than we get paid for this stuff. Boy, it would be great to try to get some of those clients that first time you quote what feels like the moon and they're like, oh yeah, that's a no brainer. And it just kind of breaks your reality. Right last the first time things don't burn down when you're away. I mean, is there any better feeling? You are so afraid of leaving and you are thinking of all the things that you have to do and all the things that people are waiting on you for, as if the entire world is watching you and watching for you to leave just to get mad that you're not responding or something like that. Meanwhile you've got this machine chugging along and we are so, I mean we're so important to that machine. Nobody else sees all the things that we do for that machine quite like I do. Surely it's going to go off the rails as soon as you're gone. And it's usually, it's usually just fine. In fact, sometimes it's good if it goes off the rails. That in my experiences that can like accelerate learnings for other people so fast. Some of the best times we had were when you had like a long maternity leave or paternity leave or a big, long trip, uncomfortably long trip where it's like we kind of have no idea how to do this with the current setup but we're going to figure out a way and the change that happens over that month or whatever it is would have otherwise taken years and you're like thank goodness that this change happened because I don't know when it would have happened otherwise. Leaving stepping away is actually a fantastic forcing function. In fact I've heard of people going as far as like mandating people going away so that they can't hoard responsibility and all that. I think it makes a ton of sense. Maybe there's like a, I know like an every other year forced sabbatical or something like that that's like a healthy reset for everyone. What do you got? What are your impact initiators or progress pivots, expansion enhancers? I want to see them down in the comments. Share your opportunity openers and catalyst changes and hopefully you picked up a helpful success spark or growth gain today. Okay I'll see you tomorrow.