274 This Firm Is Set To DOUBLE In Size

We got a white glove firm that is growing fast. They're trying to double in the next 12 months. Is that even a good idea? They're charging top dollar for what they do. Rates that may shock you or inspire you aspirationally. This is an interesting one. Come on in. We probably got some stuff to learn from this firm as well as some wisdom. Wisdom to share. Okay, it's roast a firm where we politely roast other accounting firms based on information that they anonymously submit to me. If you look down in the show notes, there will be a form. You can plop the goods in that form and you just might get roasted yourself. All right, without further ado, let me tell you all about this firm and a few ideas I've got. If you have comments, if there's things you've experienced that's relevant to this person, please drop that stuff in the comments. Over a thousand people listen to this podcast every single day. Imagine being on the other side of this getting roasted. People being able to hear things about your firm and be like, oh yeah, watch out for this or that, man, that's gold. So anything like that you got, pop it in the comments along the way. All right, here we go. White glove. Taxes and accounting. Tax planning and strategy implementation. Tax prep, bookkeeping, payroll and advisory. The person who submitted this is the second in command, the coo, so to speak. Last year they hit just shy of 400. The goal for 24 is to crack a million. Pardon, that's over double, especially as we brought on a third person full time and have a fourth in mind. Region A mid size Midwestern city, 99% of clients are virtual and most are in Florida, Georgia and Texas and then a few others sprinkled throughout specialization. For our tax planning, bookkeeping and payroll clients that we work with throughout the year, it's probably about half split real estate investors and the other half is split amongst small businesses owning mental health therapists, tradesmen and restaurants. Okay, so half real estate investors, the other half a mix of a few different things. They got three people, so the first partner is a 15 year accountant and CPA that does most of the fulfillment, wants to do more of the advisory and client interaction and less of the payroll books and tax prep. This person is number two and has a background in sales, admin training and copywriting. So they do everything non tax. For example, they're currently building out Taxdome as their project management software. They also do sales calls, the email list, appear in social media posts, manage the website, calendars, onboarding, pretty much everything. But Taxes. They also do a little bit of bookkeeping and payroll just to help out. The third guy they just brought on full time is an EA and extremely technical with taxes and loves the nitty gritty as a deep cut. So I have, he's coming on, we're transitioning some of the work to him, but he's not doing much client interaction, just fulfillment for now. The age old handing off the client relationship to somebody that the client didn't want to work with to begin with. That old chestnut. So thankfully today they all kind of play different roles. They also contract work to one or two other bookkeepers here and there. So they're all playing different roles, which works as long as everybody's happy in the roles that they're playing. Sounds like they complement each other today. But for example, the number one, the first person is trying to get out of more of the client work. So how do you manage that with this combination of people that you have the cadence. They still have a heavy tax prep season during the spring and fall and slower seasons during the summer and winter. We've been trying to smooth that out by meeting with clients quarterly the past 18 months or so. And now tax prep season is getting a little easier. Pricing 12k minimum for tax planning, all inclusive, out the door. We pitch it as white glove. Taxes and accounting. We do everything for you and a new client on average saves 20 to 30k in taxes. People also often push back on this, saying it's like a version of contingent fees. Contingent fees are when we stake I'm going to charge you x percent of this or that. Being able to charge top dollar for what you do because you save people a pile of money. That's not contingent fees. If you make those fees conditional on if we get you tax savings this year or not. Like, yeah, maybe that is conditional or contingent fees, but your clients can understand, if I go to this new advisor and they save me a pile of money, I'm going to pay that advisor more. Back to the brief here. So clients get four quarterly advisory meetings, one personal and one business return. Monthly bookkeeping, monthly payroll. We do all the tax stuff too. Ready to be an S Corp. We do the 2553 and set up gusto for owner payroll. We set up the Augusta rule, reimbursements and payments. We do contracts for putting kids on payroll when it makes sense and set up the payment, do sales tax filings. We do it all for the client. It's hard to tell on pricing if that the 12k was just for tax planning or if that's for everything, all included, but they are super hands on. That's great. Billing all up front. They had been taking it all up front as they were just doing tax advisory, planning and implementation. But now that we're adding in bookkeeping, we're considering doing a fee up front and then monthly for everything. Ongoing sales and marketing, mainly referrals so far, a little bit now from our YouTube videos and a few podcast interviews. So now everyone gets on our email list, which we write for five days a week, and then from there we have them book calls. If they book a call, we get a copy of their return ahead of time. We then go into the calls with a game plan of what they're missing and how we can help them lower their taxes. Interesting. And since we can also do prep, bookkeeping, et cetera, we're pitching a high ticket, 12k, 15k all inclusive solution on that sales meeting. It can be really hard not to give away the farm in a sales meeting to say, well, oh, I see that you made this mistake and that mistake and like diagnose everything right then and there. I would do the same where I want to get it ahead of time. So I have an idea of what I'm working with to know if there are opportunities. But the risk there is. You just solve all of their problems in a sales meeting. Right. So that's something you generally want to avoid. And this is where maybe our the fact that maybe we came of age in a traditional hourly billing model. There's a, there's a voice inside your head that's like, well, I've already done the work and I already know this. Why would I not just tell them? Why would I not bring this up in the meeting? Because, buddy, that's the only leverage that you've got. That's the only thing of value that you can offer, is these concepts, these ideas. And it may have taken you 10 seconds when you flipped open that tax return and you go, yep, they made the same mistake because everybody else is going to save them X amount of money. But it's like the magician where they're amazing when you don't understand how they do their trick. But as soon as you know how to do their trick, you're like, ah, I'm not impressed. That's the delicate dance with these sales calls, because how much I can do for them will impact the price for me. If I have a lot to offer them and can save them a ton of money, I'm absolutely going to price that in a premium way. But Sometimes you get clients where they're either small potatoes or there's just not that much going on and you're like I can do your stuff, but I don't know that I can save you all that much money. Those are harder ones to make money on because why would they pay you a pile? Why would they pay you? Who's investing more time and effort in advisory? Why would they pay you more than a run of the mill person if that advisory isn't going to yield them all that much in savings? Right. That's just a fit thing anyways. Be careful not to give away the farm in those sales meetings. Technology they're using Drake for Tax. Formerly HoneyBook and now TaxDome. Still implementing so TaxDome for their practice management system. Square, QuickBooks, Gusto, OpenPhone, NordPass, Calendly, Typeform, Canva and Kajabi. I wonder what they're running on. Kajabi workflow for tax planning. When they're onboarding they get access to the QBO, QuickBooks, paychecks, the banks, state government tax sites and all that. And then we start with the bookkeeping to see where they're at. An onboarding call and then quarterly check ins after that for tax prep. They're just doing organizers in January as they mentioned, they're trying their best to smooth out tax season and trying to get more of those tax clients to either have them do the books or work with a professional bookkeeper. So those returns are less work than they were before. Pains getting the number one, the original owner there out of the daily grind. So finding, hiring and training someone to be as diligent, proactive and knowledgeable tax wise that can also sell and wants to talk to clients looking for a real unicorn. You are there. He's got to get better at training someone to do that and also better at passing work off. Another thing that sucks is stuff is still very manual. Requesting docs from clients again and again. Wasting a lot of time on that. The other big pain point, we are great salesmen. We're not great marketers. Like I don't know how to get people in the door once they're on the email list and get on the calendar we close like Alec Baldwin and Glengarry Glen Ross. We just don't know where to find more of them. I'll be honest, it's a bit of a red flag for me. I'm. I'll circle back to that enjoyment. I love teaching. Once a week I teach in a tax and accounting mastermind. I love it. I was an English Teacher abroad for four years and love public speaking. So I love teaching in the Mastermind. I love writing the email list and seeing that 45% of people are opening and reading it a daily email. Wow. And lastly, I enjoy your channel. Okay, let's. We don't need to read through that. All right. If you got thoughts, ideas, things you can relate to, pop that stuff in the comments. Probably best if you do it before I share my thoughts so that I don't influence you. Today's episode, it is sponsored in part by Live Flow. Live Flow is an extension for your spreadsheet app, Excel, Google Sheets, whatever you use that lets you pull live QuickBooks data from client files and 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 going to 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 live floating link in the show notes. This episode is sponsored in part by Tech Guru Gang. We live in confusing times. We've got artificial intelligence, all sorts of technological marvels happening all around us that we're very excited about. But how do we weighed into this stuff responsibly? How do I know that I'm not giving up my lucky charms to just whatever new hot AI thing just cropped up? Gang, you need a team of smart, attractive, well educated IT professionals that are on your side because you got better things to do than fix Tina's laptop when it doesn't boot up on Thursday. You're better than that. Okay, Tech Guru's got everything you need to help your Firm navigate what is a tricky time. You know, Boy, managing tech with a. Like, even in an office, but across a remote team, too. Not fun. It's a lot of work. Tech guru, they just work with accounting firms so they know all the stinky old tools you got to use. If you're a tax firm, they know the weird cycles of your business, and they're learning from every other firm that they work with. And you know who's going to. Who's going to benefit from that? You. You. Okay, so go swipe the link in the show notes, schedule a call with them. You got nothing to lose. Tech guru. My first thought, be careful with the old sales process. I can. I'll just tell you my personal experience. This may or may not be what's happening here. I can tell you what I got wrong here. I came up in a culture where there was no greater achievement than closing a client. In fact, I had partners tell me almost that exact same thing. I don't think I've ever sat down to lunch with somebody and them not come and work for us. Now consider, what is the likelihood that every single person you ever sit down with is good for you? You might be great for every single person that you sit down with, but that does not mean that they're good for you. Now, there's. There's different stages of firm running, and this firm is definitely early days, and you've. You've grown a lot, and that's cool. And that was the stage where, you know, even in my cast practice, like, we were taking on just about anything to kind of get things going and up to a more sustainable spot. And at that stage, you got to do what you got to do. But you are at the point now where you have the power to be selective, particularly if these people are on an email list and they perceive you as kind of being a premium option, They've already built a bit of a relationship with you. Coming in the door. I would just say, how do I say this in a way that doesn't sound mean? I learned over time that closing every sale was not the flex that I thought it was. And as I saw it and, you know, began, you know, came into the sales process myself with that machismo that I had picked up from everybody else that I had worked with, thinking like, yeah, I got to get good at this so that I can close every single one. What I learned in the process, as I saw more of that and was exposed to more of what my partners were doing, what I learned was they were very Good, like, like they, they really were. But they also oftentimes gave away more than the competition. So my firm was competing with upmarket firms. Where we were setting our rates was by the end somewhat aggressive. Where I was trying to, trying to basically set it more or less where, you know, a nearby Top 100 firm was setting it. And if we compared ourselves to what those top 100 firms did when they sat down and had a sales meeting with a client, I can tell you what my partner was doing, what they, that they weren't doing. He was giving them his cell phone number. He was making them feel like he was going to be available at their beck and call and would just have to work with him and wouldn't have to work with the rest of the team. And he was promising more for less and that's why they were choosing him. I mean, he was very good and very convincing, but at the end of the day, people were choosing him because they were getting more for less. And I don't know about you, but this is the analogy I always come back to when I'm checking out at the grocery store and I got a Hershey's bar and a Toblerone and that ToblerOne is priced 2.5x what the Hershey's bar is and it's half the size. Is Hershey's. The no brainer deal there. What do you go for? People are going to have different reactions to that, right? There's going to be people that say you're a sucker to buy the Toblerone. There's also going to be people that say I'm going to buy the Toblerone because I identify as the type of person that would go for the premium thing. But as long as you're selling Hershey's bars, you're going to attract Hershey's buyers. And that was what I never wanted my firm to be, was the one that would come in and give more than the other firms to get the work. Now, not saying that's happening here, but I would also argue you should never close 100% of those sales conversations. That shouldn't, that shouldn't be the goal. And if we combine this with the fact that the number one is having a hard time of getting out from under the work, I could tell you in my situation, the partner that I had do that the most, who was always everybody, had a cell phone number and could never escape work and struggled with balancing it all more than anybody else in the firm. It was because in every one of those sales meetings he said, you're going to work with me. When you go to that other firm, you're going to get delegated down to some junior, and that's who you're going to talk with 90% of the time. And nobody likes that here, you're going to work with me. And most of the time they would still end up paying less. So of course they're going to pick us, right? I can tell you I grew the cast practice in our firm almost one and a half million in 12 months or 18 months, like a very short period of time. And you know why I did it? Because I thought it'd be impressive. Because I wanted to flex my own machismo and an environment of a bunch of other dudes that said these same things that were impressed with their ability to close sales and all that. And for me, there was a season of my life where I thought that was cool and maybe I needed to prove that to myself. And who knows, maybe it's only because I'm on the other side of that that I. That I can say this, but I can also tell you that was the least fun 18 months I ever had because I was having to hire like crazy faster than I could sustain. So we were making some compromises on all sorts of stuff that created a bunch of big headaches for me. And in the course of growing that fast, we actually weren't that profitable. It wasn't until we actually slowed way down and reduced that it actually got really profitable. Maybe the folks in this firm are at that stage of life. I was definitely there at one point in time. I didn't end up enjoying it. Did I have to learn those lessons myself to get to something better on the other side? Maybe. But if nobody else is telling you this, and I'm speaking now to the person, the people that run this firm, if nobody else has told you this yet, you're doing a great job. You're growing something really fast. That's super cool. The biggest risk here to me is probably yourselves, is probably you putting too much pressure on yourself to grow from 400 grand to, you know, a million in a year. I would like path to explore. Is that necessary? And. And why are we doing this? Like, what is the rationale for doing that? Second tip, mainly around how do you how to get some pressure off of the main person. I can say this as a. An online personality where most of my business is built around me being visible and creating content and all that. Oftentimes we don't put enough importance on optimizing for the well being of that key person. If I can't sit in front of a camera tomorrow, a whole lot of my business shuts down overnight. And I have people that work for me and all that. But if it's me and my shoes, it's a hard thing for me to say that I need help or that I need to slow down or pare things back. Maybe it's a dude thing like that. That's a, a hard thing to admit, particularly for like quote unquote successful achievers. So I would like really prioritize this over the next year because if this person runs out of steam, that hurts, that impacts everybody. I think it's a bigger deal than, than we often treat it as. So some ideas for how we can better manage the balance of work for this individual. You've got another technical person that can, that can pick up some work, but it sounds like they're not doing much client facing stuff yet. I think you probably get yourself in trouble if you end up taking on a ton of clients because you've got right now one person doing client facing stuff. You've got you the submitter here who's doing op stuff and not touching tax. And then you've got a technical person who you're not letting talk to clients. And maybe they're not super suited to be able to do that, but that is a recipe for putting a whole crapload onto that one person. In fact, in this day and age, hiring people who can't do client relationship management can be a real burden on everyone else around them because the work and the fulfillment, all that's getting faster and more efficient at a rate that is faster than the client relationship is being made more efficient. Does that make sense? We're doing a higher volume of work because we can do that work more efficiently. But the client management is still the client management. And so if you added 10 people that can just sit in the back of an office and crank out work all day, boy, did you just make your client relationship people's lives miserable. Right? So something's got to give there. You either got to pull in somebody that can do client facing stuff. The person that you described is a real, real unicorn to to be able to say I want to go out and find somebody that can do everything that our founder can do, that has built this amazing firm from scratch. Is that realistic? If they're truly capable of that, why would they not go out and run their own thing? Right? So maybe there's an opportunity here to carve up some of the responsibilities of this individual to where like they will exclusively do client comms and not the write up on these clients. Or another kind of threshold based approach here is they won't touch clients under a certain size threshold. This is, this is a hard thing for, for small firm owners to give up. But on your whole spectrum of clients, is it realistic that you need to be equally plugged into every single client across that entire spectrum? Probably not. There's probably a threshold below which you could trust it entirely to somebody else and that can free up enough headspace to be better for the folks that you really want to be good at. Right. But then what I found is if you start down that path, that may start at like, okay, I'm never, I'm never going to touch engagements that are less than, pick a number, 2,500 bucks a year. And I'm okay with that. And I can see on paper like how much money do they actually make the firm. So even worst case scenario, if they did go sideways, it wouldn't be the end of the world. So okay, I'll agree to set that threshold. But what I find over time is that if you can just make that first decision, that first trade off and deal with yourself to give that stuff up and you do that and you find that the world doesn't end, it's then way easier to start creeping that up to be like, okay, maybe I don't touch anything under under five grand or something like that. So maybe that's a different dimension on which you could carve up the work that you're trying to get off of this person's plate. The other big thing that you're just going to have to address at stake some point is if that person is bringing everything in the door and you win on relationships, it's going to be really hard to then hand that work down to somebody else because they came to you wanting to work with you. And nobody appreciates that rug pull of having to get handed off to someone else. Like people these days are like, will deal with it because they understand how that works and they probably had it done to them before. But the sustainable solution here is either having like a sales and onboarding team where it's very explicit in the beginning, you're just going to do the sales and onboarding with us and that's it. And then it goes to somebody else permanently and you never talk with them again, or have people on your team that will meet with those clients, do the sales meetings and serve them ongoing, like completely cutting out this we'll call them the partner from that whole process. And that may mean making some trade offs on the type of clients that you bring in or what types of clients are good for your team versus what types of clients are good for that partner. But as long as they're the one bringing everything in, that's going to be really hard to delegate. 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. 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 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. 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're kind of stuck with that BPO if you love the people that you have at the BPO. So upsides and downsides. Two 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. I can tell you what I did like in my cast practice at a really sharp guy that was just like people absolutely loved as soon as they got on a call with him. He was so good at building relationships like just a good old boy. But he was very capable at all the accounting stuff. He could do anything. And he became our sales and onboarding person because people loved him behind the scenes. I could help him a bunch with, with how to manage the sales conversation and help him build his confidence there. But then it was his job to get through like the first month or two close. And we were very upfront about this, the fact that he's going to do your sales and onboarding and that they weren't going to be working with him forever. But then after that the work would go to someone else to be done on an ongoing basis. And this Actually unlocked a few things for us. One, the people who could do that ongoing work didn't need to be as high of a level technically because they didn't have to do the cleanup. The cleanup was the worst, the messiest stuff. And by the time it got handed off to the ongoing folks, we had bank rules set up, we had all the, all the skeletons out of the closet and everything was good. And it kind of ended up like for this sales and onboarding person, it let them focus on higher value things and not perpetually be adding projects that would be stuck with them forever. They would take on a new client to onboard and they knew within a few months time it'd be totally off their plate. Now you still have a degree of the problem of you don't want to fall in love with somebody and then never get to work with them going forward. So you'd actually start doing is. We'd pull that ongoing person into meetings from the beginning and so they would know there would be no blindness to who they would eventually work with down the road. They would know this is the person that's going to transition to eventually. They were already in the loop. And then after that second month close, that's the deal. It goes to them after that. So you're number one, your partner. You could take an approach like that where they are the figurehead, they're going to get things started. But from the very beginning, you have somebody else in there. You just got to be really clear that like you are the sales guy, you are the onboarding guy, and then the team's going to support you from there. Last tip I have here, and it's specifically for the CEO person that submitted this form. Explore if there's any like high leverage ways that you can help to educate clients and prospective clients. So there this person is running the newsletter on a daily basis. That's awesome. By the way, if it's only going out in newsletter format, man, see if you can repurpose that into a podcast. Even if it's a little bite sized podcast, in my opinion. I don't know. I have no data on this, but I think we have just as many like podcast consumers out there in the world as newsletter consumers, particularly daily builds up like a really cool habit of somebody's exercising every single day to be able to tune into that podcast. You know, I hear from people, I listen to it when I take my dogs on a walk or when I drive the kids to school, that sort of thing. If you're already doing the work of writing it consider also building a podcast feed around it. That wasn't my point though. My main point was how can you pull that joy of teaching in to potentially attract new or better clients? I saw that they're using Kajabi. Maybe there's a way to continue developing content that's helpful for a specific type of person. Real estate investor is like your biggest group right now. If you're still wanting to grow the business and build it into something bigger. But maybe not, maybe you're not in a place where you could pull a whole bunch of people in to do the fulfillment and you're still kind of working out the kinks. There could be worth exploring content and like a products business. So what is, what's the sort of course that a real estate investor would buy, particularly if it leads to them becoming higher ticket customers, like clients eventually, right? Normally people approach this through the lens of having a low ticket buy, having a high ticket buy. So low ticket being less than a thousand, high ticket being for this group, I would say four to 20 grand. And if that's all they ever do, great, because that's actually a great business. But if they then come on to be clients, realistically, when they already have this relationship with you, you can charge, I mean at least 1 1/2 x the rates because you're one of one for them. They haven't gone through that course with anybody else. And my thinking is that there's a version of this that you can marry with your love for teaching. That could be a fun way to kind of get the best of both worlds. On the subject of content, I wanted to share one story I heard the other day that was really cool. It was on Alex Hermosi's podcast and I cringe just at. I just want you to know how hard it is for me to say the name Alex Hermosi because he's everything sweaty Internet think boy culture. That is just a meme. It is him in those tight little gym shorts. But on his podcast the other day, quick listen. I'll put a link to it in the show notes. It was all of 20 minutes shared the story of a lady who helps registered dietitians bill insurance better so billing codes, all that. It is all a big game and there's a lot of money in doing it just right if you've worked with docs of any kind. So all this lady does is post on social media. I think they said once a day. She has 5,000 followers on Instagram. Posts average between 15 and 20 likes. And from that she has 10 sales a day of her low ticket product. I think they said it was a couple hundred bucks, two sales a day. Was it a day? Maybe it was a week. That seems like too much of her high ticket product, which is between four and five grand. She's been doing this for a few years now, has 2,900 people on an email list and is running a solo million dollar business just from this 5000 follower Instagram account. She got her first sale when she had eight people on her email list. Man, it is a great reminder that vanity metrics are totally a trap and that every single like and every single impression on the other side is a real human being who could be a customer who you could change their life. We want to go after the numbers that we hear from other people and how impressive they can be. And this is what usually stops us from creating content. But you look at a person like this where they found a super cool little corner where they can be really helpful and provide valuable advice. This is not too dissimilar to what we do. This business works for this individual because they can save people money. You and I, we have technical expertise that can save people money and it doesn't require having a massive following to genuinely help people and build that into a cool business that attracts people. It was a really cool story. Alex did a podcast about it because it just kind of blew his mind. And he said it's a lesson that he's had to learn several times. As in his business, as soon as he tries to widen out the content a bit and go more general, they do big numbers and less revenue. And man, that resonates for me so much in my business because I try to keep so targeted on the small firm owner or the small firm leader. And I know I could go put out like a tax advice video or a general accounting education video or a how to use QuickBooks type of video that would get 10 times the views of anything else that I've ever done. But that's not a cool business. Like, the money wouldn't be there. Like, I can make money on the stuff that I do because I have a bunch of firm owners in the audience and that's a really valuable audience for software companies to advertise to. And as soon as I go more general chasing those vanity metrics, like, that kind of ruins my business. But for those of us that haven't started down the path of making content, we think we got to get to these big huge numbers for it to be impactful. Man, all it takes is one person seeing something. Think about how many clients you have on your client list and how many clients you add a year. Those are not big numbers. If you compare that to the number of people that sees a tweet, a LinkedIn post, that sort of thing, man, it doesn't take much to unlock a new type of customer that can make your business way more profitable or take you in a cool direction you never expected. That part is a fun lesson. I will it's down in the Show Notes. I recommend you check it out. If nothing else will get you excited about just like how accessible that is how it you don't have to be an influencer. Like, this person's content is not highly produced. They don't have the juice. Like, it's not this magic sort of formula. It's useful. And we are already useful because people pay us for what we do really well. We run cool little businesses, so you've already got the tools that you need to make something interesting like that. If you want to get your firm roasted form down in the show notes, pop your deets in there. You may be roasted in our next episode. And thanks for coming and hanging today. I'll see you tomorrow. Sam.