279 How To Charge For Catchup Work & Back Tax Work

Catch up work, be it months of accounting, be it old tax returns that haven't been done or need to be amended, how do we price for them? These can be dodgy projects, all sorts of skeletons you can stumble into, perhaps dangerous precedents you can set with a new client. I put out the question on social media, got a bunch of bunch of stuff in response. Some good ideas, some bad ideas. But I think it gave me a kind of a more holistic process perspective on the various different ways you can do this and some traps to look out for. Come on in. Today we're talking catch up work. I'm a big believer in ketchup myself. It's Heinz or nothing. But two out of three of my kids don't like ketchup. Super disappointing. But half their genes are their moms. So I can tell you what I did, not what I did, what the firms I worked at did. As I came of age as a budding young accountant, we would discount the H out of cleanup work because you look at it and you're like, well, it's just a big kind of compressed body of work. We know how to do that super fast. Economies of scale, this, that we wanna impress them or we wanna just get em in the door so it will give away the farm. And so you do, you know, a whole bunch of work at half price or even, honestly even less than that. When it was a big body of catch up work, the first firms I worked at, I think they got excited about this stuff because it was a larger body of work. You could charge more for it in total. If you were catching up a few years tax returns or a couple years bookkeeping, you could charge on a whole bunch for it all at once. And that somehow made it exciting or worthwhile or one of those projects that was quote gold because we could do it during the slow time. Right? Like something to keep you busy. Nevermind the fact that doing this sets some, some bad precedence and does nothing to ensure that this is actually a client that you want to work with long term. Like if I got to discount the heck out of something to get somebody started, I, I have to consider why did I just do that if the client would not have otherwise joined us if I didn't discount that work, is that something that's worth finding out now at the beginning of the client relationship? Right. The whole do I discount it or not? Conversation purely through the lens of financial optimization only matters to the extent that folks would have otherwise left if you didn't discount it. And there's A there's a whole bunch of angles to this conversation, but what if we just stripped it back to if you're sitting across the table from a client and they say the the last guy discounted it 40% to do cleanup work, why don't you discount it? And you say, well we just don't. We charge full rates for it and they leave, will you feel any regret? Like would you have felt like you made the wrong decision? I think most of us that discount or non discount, in all likelihood it is not going to spook the good client, the great long term client. I don't know that that will truly be the differentiator. Now it's also a question of how unique are you? Are you one of one? Are you like the big boss in this space? One of two or three real subject matter experts within a domain so that there are not a bunch of substitutes that's going to be a factor for the client. But I would argue most of the time if they will leave if you don't discount, that's actually a great signal that you want to be aware of that they may not be a great, great client long term. But to back up, I want to run through some of the stuff that folks shared on social media because some of it was pretty smart. So here's what I put on social media. It was actually a poll. I said you're taking on a new bookkeeping client at 800 bucks a they've got 14 months of bookkeeping to get caught up. What do you charge them? First option was that'll be 800 bucks times 14. So taking the rate that you're gonna charge them going forward and just saying okay, you want us to catch up. 14 months, it's your monthly rate times 14 months. Next option was it'll be something less. Next option was it'll be something more. And then last was show me the Results. On Twitter, 10% more people charged less than the ongoing forward looking rate to do catch up work, then charged more. 20% charged more. 20, 30% charged less. Over on the LinkedIn side, actually 2% fewer people said they would charge less. More people said they would charge more. So across both platforms like on average you have about an equal number of people that say they will charge more for catch up work than they would the standard monthly rate versus people who say they would charge less. And in both cases on both Twitter and on LinkedIn for fewer people said they would just charge the same charge whatever they're gonna charge going forward, which I thought was kind of Interesting. So it's something that people are opinionated on either. No, I need to charge them more so that I'm not rewarding bad behavior. Just getting them to do. Getting them to come and ask me for cleanup work all the time versus I'm gonna discount it because I just wanna get em in the door. So to run through some of the things that folks shared. Brenda Cannon I said she'll give a small discount to get them caught up. More concerned about the monthly fee going forward and the client being a good fit, I asked is that cleanup a condition of accepting like the ongoing monthly work? Are you only gonna do cleanup work for folks who agree to do forward? Like ongoing work with you going forward? Brenda said she confirmed they only do that cleanup work for ongoing clients. Travis Shirley just lost a new prospect over this. They agreed to 1,200 bucks a month only to find out they were five months behind and expected them to catch it up as part of the normal months monthly fee. A lot of clients just assume you're going to be willing to do this. I said probably dodged a bullet. Ben Kuhn's we will discount since we can do it relatively quickly. Cleanup isn't a huge part of our business but we do it because we really want to get them on recurring revenue going forward. Mountain West Tax easy. That will be 14 months of bookkeeping for free because I didn't scope it properly and I'm afraid to change my original quote. How many dollars do we give away every single year just because we don't want to have to make the uncomfortable phone call. That needs to be like a paid service we could delegate out to somebody. There are people that like that stuff that have no problem doing it. We had a person that worked for us who super enjoyed calling people to get them to pay their invoices and it was like what kind of maniac are you to enjoy that? But it just goes to show you for the stuff that you don't like, even if it's weird stuff, there's somebody out there who can make it fun. Terry Alley said we take a retainer of 50% of the expected catch up fee and work against that. Update the client on progress and prognosis when we've used up the retainer sometimes, quote unquote, catching up means major cleanup which is a very different fee. We're going to circle back to this the notion of stumbling into surprises when you're doing cleanup work. And is that the job of cleanup work to find surprises? Clay Welsh cleanup at 75% of the monthly fee or a discount of a few months if it ends up being a similar percentage, but only with an ongoing monthly engagement that starts concurrently and irons two engagements paid up front. I used to discount. Not any longer. In fact, for ongoing engagements where clients are dumping info all at once. If it's after year end and it's tax prep, not if it's after year end, it's considered tax prep, not bookkeeping, and gets charged accordingly. About 2x the fee. Ooh. So if people are bringing bookkeeping to Ann in tax season, she's charging 2x. I mean, when I was kind of growing up in firms, this is the problem that we would have is tax clients would bring you this pile of bank statements and you do this super cheap discounted work that's cheaper than any bookkeeper they could ever hire to do the same work. And now you're getting cheaper bookkeeping from your tax pros than you could get from an actual bookkeeper. And it reinforces this routine of them coming back every single year during tax season and us wasting a pile of time during busy season doing bookkeeping. Right? This episode sponsored in part by a Live flow. You ever look at the reporting apps and think, man, I don't, I don't need another PhD in learning this new hard thing just to tell my clients what they need to do or to give them a fancy report that they're not even gonna look at. Sometimes, sometimes the old ways are the best. The best is plug it into a spreadsheet. That's what LifeFlow does. Takes all of your accounting data, the QBO stuff, and you now have a plugin in your Excel or in your Google sheets that, with just a, just a whippity click, a couple clicks and you've got all of your client data. For any QBO clients you've got access to, you've got that stuff in a spreadsheet. Pull it in like one time, do a live sync that never stops. All your favorite reports from QuickBooks, pull it in. Just use those reports, create your own sheets that reference those reports. And so it's like live updating information, man. If you are a spreadsheet enthusiast, it is like, it's like the upgrade your spreadsheets have always needed. Like putting a jetpack on something old that hasn't changed that much on Jim Belushi. If that resonates with you, check out Live Flow link in the show Notes. Today's episode sponsored in part by the folks at Teamup who help you find talented accountants in the Philippines today We're learning more. What's an employer of record? Do I have to hire people in the Philippines through an employer of record? Basically you got two options. You can hire them as a contractor, just pay them directly on contract or hire them as an employee via an employer of record. Now employer of records usually running like four to five hundred bucks per month per employee. If you do want to hire that individual as an employee, got some other stuff there around like benefit requirements from the Philippines. But the employer record, they'll help you handle most of that. The majority of firms I talk to who hire folks directly hire them on contract, but it could make sense to go either way. We mentioned BPOs. Talked about BPOs recently. A BPO is like a company that not only employs them, serves as the employer of record, but is usually giving those people a place to work like managing it, managing more of the infrastructure. An employer of record all they do is the person that works for you is an employee of the employer of record and you pay the employer of record for them to work for you. So it's a bit more direct than a bpo, but maybe not quite as direct as bringing them on board as contractors. So there you go. Good stuff to know that you're probably too embarrassed to ask. Actually wasn't super clear on that until I went through this ad read right now. If you want somebody to help you through the process that's done this with a bunch of other firms, team up, will go out and find you some awesome hires. You pay a one time recruiting fee but because they're neither a BPO or an employer of record, you don't pay them anything ongoing after that. Learn more about teamup. Check out a link in the show notes Jessica Connor Catch up is hourly at a higher per hour rate than monthly bookkeeping. Lots can be batched. Typically it will come to less money than their on time bookkeeping would take, but could be more if there's lots of mysteries. Brett Borman Usually I'll do the normal rate and give them a 30% discount. So a discount at 30% since there's some economies of scale it was a real mixed bag. Over on the LinkedIn side a number of people asking me if they can do the work that can come like one person posted their phone number in a comment said sounds like an interesting project. That's LinkedIn for you. Sean Autry Cleanup Ketchup we normally do at 50% per month. We only do the bank recs and closing procedures for the last month. This of course assumes no big Surprise hurdles. So the big thing to look out for here is that risk of reinforcing bad behavior. If somebody's going to get cheaper work from you by being a deadbeat and just asking you to do their accounting once a year or once every couple years or something like that. And you then do super discounted work. And they say, okay, see you later, see you in a year, man, you're just like, you're getting the bad end of that deal. And we had tons of clients who had, who had abused this, where they would just come back every summer and be like, hey, can you catch all my stuff up right before I want my tax return? And it can be disguised as tax prep. But in the US 75% of small business tax prep is accounting cleanup. That's just how it is for most SMBs. And so if you're doing bookkeeping cleanup at the time that you're doing tax work, in all likelihood you're giving away a pile of discounted bookkeeping work. If you look at the services that are out there, your benches that are, you know, benches 300 bucks a month, your QuickBooks Live bookkeeping starts at 240amonth. I think run the math on that. If that is the cheapest way that they can get a really low quality bookkeeping experience out there. And even that stuff costs three grand a year as a starting price. But you're doing a business tax return for maybe less than 3,000 bucks, that involves catching up their books, you're going to have a hard, you're just going to have a hard time making money on that. I mean, even Intuit's full service business tax prep now is like, starts at 1500 bucks or more or something like that. And frankly, for all the people annoyed at at Intuit for going into business against accountants, and it is a really weird big shift from the Brad Smith era of Intuit to now this Hassan Gadarzi who's like a, a done. He said the Intuit is a done for you company. Not just a software platform, but, but the company that will do that stuff for you. As weird as that whole switch has been so far, I think it's actually pushed the floor of professional prep, tax prep and bookkeeping up because we can point our finger to that service and say, this is not a premium service at all, but here's the price of it. It's a lot of firms that are still charging that or less, and I don't want to compete with those groups that have way more resources and all that we talked about this on the podcast a couple weeks ago, like we have to be confident in being able to explain how what we do is very different than what these services, like productized services do. Talking to us here, you're gonna have versions of this in every country. I assume these kind of productized websites are gonna do your bookkeeping, do your compliance. What you're delivering is a much more personalized level of service. And at least in the US where these companies are setting their rates is frankly above what a lot of small firms are charging. And so they ought to be pushing the floor of what firms are charging up anyways. Oftentimes small business tax prep that bookkeeping cleanup is like cheap discounted bookkeeping work in disguise. Now I can see the arguments for discounting it. If you're optimizing for recurring revenue going forward, I don't see a problem with that really. If you're like, man, I'm just trying to build my recurring cash going forward, I want to get those people in the door. That's maybe the only argument I could see someone reasonably making for discounting that I would agree with. But even then, consider if they would have said no to full price, but they would have said yes to discounted ketchup. Is that a client that I want to take on? Probably depends on the stage of firm that you're in. But for a mature firm, the answer is probably not. There's some signals like this that you can suss out around pricing when you're actually getting down to brass tax with a prospect that we oftentimes don't pay close enough attention to because we want them to be something that maybe they're not to, to be a great client. And we see in them whatever we want them to be. We, we do this when we're hiring people as well. We project onto them what will make them a great client or a great hire or something like that. But when you have very limited information, you really gotta put a magnifying glass on the information that you do have because usually those things don't just go away. They're usually not a fluke. There's also a very strong argument to be made that your best clients aren't going to need catch up work. Like how did they get into that situation to begin with? The whole notion of a business coming to you needing three years tax returns, that being a great pile of work because you can charge a bunch for it and maybe do it during slow season, that may be attractive because it's a project that you can bill a lot for. But is that actually going to be a good ongoing client? Maybe not. And as much as we look at three tax returns and think, oh, I can make a bunch of money on three tax returns, the reality is the first time you're working with a new client is always the least efficient time that you're going to be working with them. So sitting down and knocking out a couple tax returns, probably not going to be a wildly efficient process compared with a client who's a great ongoing client. You're now doing their stuff for the fifth year. Like, that's when you're really humming and those things become really profitable. Now, something that came up in some of the discussions. What if you find something you don't like in that cleanup? What if there's surprise stuff there? In my opinion, your cleanup work is not the time when you find those skeletons that needs to happen, like up front in an assessment of the file. Like, you need to understand what's there. Because if you've agreed to do the cleanup work, in all likelihood you've agreed to a price to do the ongoing work. And I don't wanna do that until I actually know what's going into the scope of doing the work. So if we're finding surprises when doing cleanup work, it might be a signal that the diagnostics and the initial reviews that we do up front are not comprehensive enough. This applies to tax work as well. If they've got a little Schedule C, you need to understand what format they prepare the information for that Schedule C in stuff like that, where you can have a relatively cheap project that gets blown up, because their expectation is that you're going to pull together these 120 receipts and that's the only documentation that they have for it. So that that catch up work like, that's not where you find the skeletons. You might find some things, but whenever you do, you need to circle back to that initial file review to be like, hey, we gotta make sure we look for this thing too next time. Now, in some cases, the client may just not have the money to pay for a pile of cleanup work upfront. That's totally understandable. Oftentimes I would spread out that cleanup work over six, say six months. So if somebody's unwilling to pay full rates for that cleanup work, it's worth trying to get an understanding of why that is. If that's just a cash issue, maybe there's a way that we can help them. That wasn't super uncommon for us, where if that was going to be tight for them, we would Just, you know, we're going to get them on an ongoing going forward. And for the six months, we would add to that one sixth of whatever that cleanup work cost. So how I would do this kind of. How I would answer this question number one. Already talked about this. I'm gonna do a file review up front that is not the cleanup work to make sure I get an understanding of what's in there. This could be a paid file review. It could be something that's applied against future services if they do become a client. And I think people shy away from a formal process like this because it takes time. But buddy, it is a whole lot cheaper than getting into a bad gig that you can't make money on. If you go into an engagement without enough information and you propose a price and you say it's going to be this price going forward, you're going to lose a bunch of money on that project, that upfront like diagnostic, that is always worthwhile, even if it takes some time. It could be paid, it could be unpaid again. It's one of those situations where I think the client who would be willing to come on board, who won't pay for it versus the one who is willing to pay for it. I don't know that we lose anybody that's really good, like between those two groups. But we want to assess all that stuff out before we are quoting that ongoing rate. For accounting clients. I would just. Honestly, I would just do this at full rates. Unless there's something we see there that's going to be a huge amount of extra work. I'm thinking it just hasn't been done for the last 14 months. I would probably bill it at whatever the ongoing, like looking forward monthly rate's going to be and multiply it by the number of months. If anybody doesn't like that price and they are unwilling to pay it, that's probably just good information for me to have. Cause I probably didn't wanna work with them. The counter argument to this, well, it's not as much work. I think we need to disassociate the volume of the work that we're doing with the value of the work that we're doing. If I come to my client and I say, hey, I'm gonna give you a discount for this because it's not gonna be as much work for me to do it, okay, There's a much greater likelihood then that six months down the road the client comes back and asks for a discount. They've gotten a discount before. So now like that GENIE is out of the bottle. The notion that you'll discount this things also, when we tie the price to the time very explicitly like that, anytime the time commitment changes down the road, the client could totally circle back and be like, oh cool, so we're going to change the rates now, right? Client changes something in their business, gets a new piece of software, hey, that's going to be cheaper for me now, right? Because it's going to save you time. You make a process improvement that simplifies their month end close, you give them a great suggestion for an app to pick up and they come back and say, hey, that saved you time. You're going to give me a discount now, right? I sure hope you're not. Because the reason that they're saving that time is your years of expertise that led to that recommendation. So to start the client relationship saying, I'm going to give you a discount because this will take me less time while I get it. And I did it for years. There's probably just some risks to that. Like it's probably starting off that relationship with maybe some precedents that you don't want to set. Like I said at the top, I think the, the, the counter argument to that that I like better is we're trying to build recurring revenue and we just want to get people in whatever that takes to build that recurring revenue that I can understand. This episode of the podcast is sponsored in part by Maker's Hub. Hey, the age of AI, just like the cloud accounting transition is going to create lean in arbitrage opportunities. Arbitrage, it's the word of the day. Opportunities where tech gives us a wildly better way to do something overnight. We stumble into these things still with our clients that have awful back office procedures and we just get them on a better tech stack and it like cuts the necessary headcount to do all that work in half. That's why I loved doing our managed accounting service where we just come in, find super unoptimized back offices and be like, hey, we'll come in and do this for more or less what it was costing them to hire a team to do it, and then we just automate the heck out of it. As we're in this very transitional period with AI, I think the first example of a AI driven arbitrage opportunity is frankly going to be accounts payable Makers. Hub is one of the providers now using AI vision models to take extraction, like automated extraction to a wildly different level than has ever been been possible before. You know that old chestnut, the whole notion that your tool is going to do bill extraction so well that it'll completely eliminate manual entry, which people have been saying for over 10 years. But I don't know if you're like me, you do an AP for a client, all it takes is an extra digit somewhere and you just, you just burned a whole lot of the client's cash and that's gonna be an uncomfortable phone call. So that's a little easier said than done to like blindly trust invoice extraction when it comes to bill pay. But we've done some, some demo days on my channel now with Makers Hub showing off like just the level of detail that it will pull off of invoices, especially complex accounts payable use cases where you're doing like inventory and receiving and matching numbers of widgets to products in your system and all that. I had clients that had multiple staff doing like detailed receiving and all that matching with purchase orders. An insane amount of like manual work in these systems that Makers Hub is now like automating to a level that it's never been automated before. If you're looking for tech enabled opportunities where you can, where you can use AI to deliver super like high leverage, more profitable work to your bookkeeping clients, Makers Hub is a really interesting example to look at. I'm actually excited for, for more of this stuff. I feel like it's, it's kind of like the cloud accounting transition but with even like even more promise, potentially even higher leverage. You want to explore that for ap, check out Microsub. Put a link in the show notes. This episode is sponsored in part by Cloud accountant Staffing man. People have strong opinions on offshoring. How dare you send accounting work, accounting work overseas? I've shared before starting to hire people offshore was probably top three top five biggest unlocks I had in my firm running days because we're perpetually people constrained. And when we started hiring folks in the Philippines and they just became a part of our distributed team, I ran a distributed team and there was just one more team member. We went four for four. Every single one of them were awesome. I had never hired four people in a row onshore and all of them worked out. They were going through trainings alongside my onshore team. So stinking good. And the amazing thing was just the supply of accountants in the Philippines was completely different than it was here in South States. So we could actually plan and know, okay, we will be able to go out and find this type of person and that type of person before we get there. Like here's what we want things to look like in nine months, here's where we might make a hire. There's where we make a hire. I had been blocked for four years on any sort of planning like this. Just because we had such a hard time finding the right people onshore. This completely changed how we ran our firm. It did change the makeup of what roles were client facing and what roles weren't client client facing. It shuffled that up a bit. But there is a certain inevitability to the globalization of work. I'd encourage you to learn more about it. I'll put a link to Cloud account Stephanie in the show Notes. You can hop on a call with them, ask all the embarrassing, the ignorant questions. It's just one of those things where a lot of people have strong opinions on it, but most people still just haven't done it, haven't even touched it. And I think until you work with offshore people, until you have integrated them into your business and seeing the pros and the cons of it, I think it's a big blind spot, Big old blind spot, particularly in the context where we are usually going to be staffing, constrained people blocked. Right. Want to learn more about that one? Check out the link in the show notes. Now, for tax, let's say you got to go back and file old returns or amend old returns. I'm charging full rates, just like with bookkeeping here. I think the rationale is you're amending a return. You're like, the rationale is, oh, we only have to enter into the software. The stuff that. That's changing. What does that have to do with the value to the client? If I get a new client in and I'm like, oh, yeah, no, your last preparer totally dropped the ball on this. They did this wrong. We're gonna amend this, and it's gonna save you 10 grand. You mean to tell me that the fact that it takes you five minutes to change those coatings in the tax software means that you should only charge for five minutes of your time? People get caught up on contingent fees here. Value billing is not contingent fees. Contingent fees in tax is, is I'm gonna charge you a percentage of your refund or based on that outcome or something like that, Value pricing is, I have a client that makes $10 million a year, and I have a client that makes $10 a year. When I put in a smart tax saving strategy, it saves that $10 million a year client a whole lot more money. So the value of what I do for them is much more valuable. I can charge them more. That's not contingent fees. So when it comes to tax prep, I'm doing the same thing. I'm gonna be charging full rates because those rates are the value of the tax return and a reflection that I have. Now, a number of people in the comments said they could see this going either way, but what they really wanted was guidance on how to approach this conversation. How do I have this conversation with my client? So I got a client right here, Gerald, actually just prepared a proposal for him. We're gonna go through this live. Knowing Gerald, I think he's gonna push back. But we'll. We'll see what we can do. We'll see if we can get him through it. All right, Gerald, here's the proposal to get your bookkeeping caught up. Take a look.

Too expensive.

That's it then. Okay, off to a good start. Which part?

All of it.

Okay, maybe this won't work. Okay, well, that's our price for getting it done.

Not worth it.

Okay, see you later, Gerald.

Don't need it anyway.

Okay, I made a. I might have set the difficulty too high on this. So what I'm using here, it's Claude. Claude. AI. I gave it a prompt. You're a coddlingly old guy. It's of kind conversation with a client. You're not gonna be happy about what I tell you. You're gonna push back. I was more using my internal voice there. If a client pushed back like that, I would probably try to give him a little grace. Let's try again here. So, exact same prompt. Okay, Gerald, here's the proposal to get your bookkeeping caught up.

Fine. Let me see it then.

I just gave it to you. Here you go. Here you go, Gerald.

Too expensive. Won't pay that much.

Okay, we're going like full accounting, D and D. I patiently try to understand. Gerald. I'm sorry. That's more than you expected. It's $800 a month going forward and 950amonth for each month of ketchup. What were you expecting?

Thought it'd be half that. You're robbing me blind.

You're robbing me blind. All right, what do we tell Gerald here? What specifically makes you think that it would be half the that? Let's try to open them up a bit.

My nephew said he'd do it for free.

Nephew said he'd do it for free? Is there a reason you didn't have your nephew do it? That's a great deal.

Boy's too busy with his video games these days.

Video games these days. Have you considered doing it yourself? I. I don't know how to get past this. I don't know if I got to like warm them up.

Don't have the time. Got a business to run.

You know, I can understand that. In your business, what do you say when a customer pushes back on prices?

Bah. Tell them to pound sand if they don't like it.

Okay, well I like it too much to tell you to go pound sand, Gerald. Here's the deal. The problem is if I discount catch up work, it puts my workflow in a bind and people just come back to me once a year saying they want it caught up for a discount. The reality is this is what I think it's worth. That's why we charge this way for it. How does that sit with you?

Listen here, sonny, I've been been in business longer than you've been alive.

Should I tell you to go pound sand then? People like Gerald, you just gotta. You just gotta stare him down. All right.

Long pause. Got some spine after all. All right, let's talk turkey.

Okay, that's progress. Is he trying to negotiate with me here? I don't negotiate. I can't set that precedent. We got some great opportunities to simplify our back office. I wanna knock out the catch up work so that we can focus on forward looking opportunities that are gonna save you a pile of time and money. When can we get started?

Well, suppose we could give it a whirl. But don't think I'm happy about it.

Alright, how could I throw him a bone? What do I know about Gerald? How about this? One of my best accounting managers used to be a farmer too. I think the two of you will hit it off. Why don't I pull him to do your work? I think you'll love him.

A farmer, you say? Pause. Well, why didn't you lead with that? Fine, let's get on with it then.

I put my hand out for a big handshake and lock eyes with Gerald.

Grudgingly extends hand all right, all right, don't get all mushy on me now.

I squeeze his hand firmly but don't let go. Maintaining eye contact.

Shifts uncomfortably but doesn't pull away. What's the big idea? You trying to read my fortune or something?

Is that what they call it now? My grandpappy used to tell me if a man couldn't look you in the eye when he shook his hand, he wasn't man at all. I drop his hand, clapping Gerald on the shoulder of his Cardhart jacket. Good man.

Chuckles gruffly. Your grandpappy sounds like he had some sense. All right, you've twisted my arm. Let's get this show on the road.

Without a word, I nod the tip of my 10 gallon hat toward Gerald.

Nods back, a hint of respect in his eyes.

Got him.

Reckon we understand each other now. Don't make me regret this, young fella.

Okay, I think that's enough Gerald for fanfic for one day. Thanks for coming and hanging. I'll catch you in the next one.