290 Is Value Pricing Amoral?

Is value pricing amoral? Is it wrong to charge someone something different than what you would charge someone else for the same thing? It's fundamentally pricing discrimination. Right, but does that make it wrong? Is value pricing just about money arbitrage? Being able to promise them a financial reward and charging for a percentage of that? Is that a contingency fee? What are the situations where it's just too much work for the juice to be worth the squeeze? We round up a whole bunch of questions for from the comments from social media trying to mindfully pick through this stuff. Because where we are at today is largely bound by kind of our assumptions and our worldview of what our understanding is right now. And you generally cannot get to something better until you break some aspect of the way you see things today. And so I'm coming in as open minded as I can be. Cause I think you kind of have to be in that state. You have to have that open mindedness to open yourself to a change that could take you to something better. So come on in. We're wrapping up value pricing week. Digging through the messy stuff today. Let's do it. This was probably the, the most common through line for all of the commentary this week on value pricing. All sorts of different types of objections and, and the value pricing stands coming out and saying you're missing this, you're miss. Probably the biggest, the most common objection is it just doesn't feel right for person A to walk in the door and you give them this price and then person B walk through the door wanting the exact same services and giving them a completely different price. If those two clients walked back out the door and chatted in the parking lot and found out that one of them was paying me 10 times more than the other and then they came back in and confronted me about it, how would I feel? Would I feel that I had just wronged somebody or just hosed somebody? The value pricing moral dilemma Let me run you through some commentary from folks. The commentary I'm going to pull from social media, I won't call out the people directly since people don't post on social media with the hope of being called out on a podcast. So like if you commented on a video or something like that, I will, I'll say who it was and all that, but if it was just somebody commenting on social, I won't. This I thought was, was great commentary. The hardest part is trying to determine what the price should be. I disagree with the idea of charging different fees based on the means of the client. I understand the heart of this one. One trend that came up in a number of responses is definitely the focus on money. And it is probably the biggest part of it. If I can save somebody 10 grand, it's a whole lot easier to charge em 5 grand or pick a number. But it's also not just financial return, it is how we're helping the client to manage risk. It is the cost of the fail state or the alternatives, or the potential cost of it going wrong. As much as I hate peace of mind and don't put that on your website, it is being able to, you know, not manage that part of your business yourself. The stuff that you don't like, how big of a pain is it for you? If you absolutely despise it, then you'll happily pay to have the right person knock that stuff out for you. And and you will probably pay more than the other person who doesn't despise it quite as much. So from this comment, the notion that it's based on the means of the client, I wouldn't say value pricing is really based on the means of the client. That can certainly impact one's ability to pay more. And it's that old like car salesman trick, right, where they go out and they see the car that you drive up in and that impacts kind of how you negotiate. So while that's not like a core tenant of value pricing by any means, see what type of car they drove up in, I, I think it for sure plays a part. I'm sure. So the meat of that comment was I disagree with the idea of charging different fees based on the means of the client. Jonathan Stark, who we've actually talked about this week, he hopped in on some of the replies. He replied here, yes, but value pricing cuts both ways. Surely you're not against senior citizen discounts at the movies, right? I've seen a number of versions of this of like social good discounts. I don't know that I would bucket that into the same moral class as charging 10x to a billionaire. In fact, even the worst version of that, I don't know that any of us feel that bad price gouging a billionaire, but maybe the worst version of that is two people, two entrepreneurs of equal means, who through very different price sensitivities and risk profiles and maybe even a lack of alternatives. If I charge two entrepreneurs of the same means a 10x difference and they do that, they do the parking lot thing, I would actually feel worse about disparate fees for clients of equal means. Another comment here along the same lines. If value pricing involves trying to charge as much as possible based on what we think the customer will pay, then I'm not in favor of it. It just sounds like we're trying to charge as much money as possible rather than actually pricing the services offered. There's something about that that seems a little sleazy to me. Totally understandable. Even if you don't totally buy into that, I think most of us would admit to feeling a bit of that. I replied here your latter statement actually pricing the services offered. I asked, what reality do you anchor that price to? Is that relative to competitors, some sort of industry benchmark, et cetera? They replied, I use competitors as a starting point and then I make adjustments based on the time and complexity I think it will be. Competitors, in my opinion, are definitely not like a source of truth or a source of reality. People are ultimately determining whether it's worthwhile according to how much it is worth to them. Stickier here than what is the source of the price, I think is the notion of charging wildly different things for the same collection of services to client A and client B. But I do, I there's. I do think there's pushback sometimes against like the notion of like value pricing being real or some source of truth. Like we do, we do buy according to value, that like there is no absolute price. All the alternatives of. Well then, what do you anchor the pricing in? It's looking at your competition, it's looking at averages. It's not founded in anything that I would say is more real than the value that the buyer assigns to it. So it's a thing. I wouldn't go as far as to say that makes it fine to charge different people wildly different amounts. But on a whole, like almost in aggregate, the general value folks assigned assigned to something that to me feels like the most real number that you could put on something like that. This one kind of gets into the same concept, but from a bit of a different angle. Another comment here. My problem slash hurdle with value pricing is that value is in the eye of the beholder. I might think my services are extremely valuable, but my client might not see the same view. It's been difficult to find clients that see advisory and as valuable beyond compliance. So I was curious here. How do they. How do they approach that conversation of value and how do you suss out what that client will value? I said, if you're sitting across the table from a client right now, how do you frame what the value is to them? Is that tax savings piece of mind? What do you usually go for? I don't have a solution, just want to learn what it is, what is and isn't working. They said I typically pitch that they will know where their money is going. They'll be able to understand what their numbers are telling them. They'll avoid surprises at the end of the year. And then by having someone on their team year round, we can maximize tax savings, savings opportunities as the year happens rather than looking back at missed opportunities. Difficult to put a value on it and say I'm convinced. You'll say save X and that will justify a fee of Y. The client has to agree that the strategy will work for them. It's why I typically stick to a flat fee based on what I think I can get based upon estimated time and complexity. But this is interesting. There's also an element of what will the market bear. For example, as larger firms in my area drop their smaller clients, I'm sometimes raising my fees 5 to 6x because of what larger firm was charging them. That's a really interesting conversation because we went full circle from I struggle to get my clients to value what I do to the same level that I value it. We got a bit into what was, I think more of an explanation of definitely what accountants see the value as being. And it's not to say that can't be the same as what the customer sees the value as. But value through the lens of the customer to me looks more like how will it make their business more profitable? How will we get them time back? How will we save some time from a member of their team that can instead go and make more sales calls or drive something that ultimately impacts the profitability of the business? That to me is like a more client led version of what is that value discussion. But then really interesting. They're kind of being gridlocked on what is my value. I assign to it versus theirs to then come back to. Oh yeah, I also get clients from a big firm down the street and sometimes raise my fees 5 to 6x because of what the larger firm was charging them. And you can, and you can do that. And I think when we come into those situations, I had a conversation with someone last year where they were like, basically there was a regional firm in town that said they're no longer going to take any clients that are under 10k in annual fees per year. And they dumped hundreds of clients like local clients overnight. And this was a tax firm, normal tax firm. You're charging, you know, one to three a year for business tax prep and all of a sudden, you've got now all these clients ready to pay 5 to 10 a year just falling into your lap for largely the same work. And I think in those situations myself, most people, this commenter, I don't think we feel bad doing that. That client gets passed down to us from a big firm, whatever, for whatever reason, that doesn't feel as slimy. But that to me, is a classic example of people buying according to the perceived value of something in a way that is not at all tied to monetary savings. That big firm was not saving them any more money than you can. So why were they willing to pay 5-6x the rates? Perception is reality, man. Like, they're seeing this big, impressive firm. There's this maybe a degree of prestige or exclusivity in being able to be on this firm's client list, but you see the quality of the work that you get from big firms. In most cases, I won't say in most cases, We've all encountered a lot of situations where you get a client from a larger firm that was just paying this unthinkable, just unconscionable fee, and then you see the quality of the work and you're like, they missed what? And it just, it just blows your mind, right? Yet those people are paying 5 to 6x the rates. There is an aspect of being in denial of value pricing that feels a little bit like swimming against the universe, where you're like, yeah, no, I could. I can totally see it. And I get, I get how this is. I still think what we're missing is the hyper practical application for small firms. And I think what we've gotten to this week is piecemeal work makes value pricing virtually impossible. Because somebody comes to you and says, can you just do this or that? Just do this or that. And the implication is that that work is commoditized before you even start doing it. Now, a couple days ago, we talked about all sorts of strategies for decommoditizing the work that you do and how anything at the end of the day can be decommoditized. And I do believe that if they can do it for toilet paper and get people to pay more for premium stuff, then for goodness sakes, we can do it with professional services. But in situations where it is high volume, maybe you're doing a high volume of low touch, like once a year clients or engagements that have been kind of fragmented, where you're charging them this for payroll, and then sometimes they want you to do 1099, then it's just kind of like broken apart. It's very hard to get to I think a meaningful value pricing conversation with the client. Unless you really have your fingers on a bunch of stuff and you can actually say there's enough of a relationship here that we can price the relationship as opposed to picking up little onesie twosie like bits and pieces of the business. Real piecemeal stuff where it's really hard to do anything but charge for the services. This episode is sponsored in part by Team Up Story Time. Gather around. Sit in a circle Jonathan. Happy team up customer. See if this story sounds sounds relatable Clients were beating down Jonathan's door. He was growing so quickly, couldn't keep up. The problem was he couldn't find anyone in the US at a salary that he could really afford. Then he had an experience that opened his eyes. Eyes. He hired his first accountant in the Philippines. Couldn't believe how good she was. Not only did she do the work well, but she was fast. So he hired another. This time a senior accountant. He wanted to be in charge of quality assurance. He needed her to do things like set up special funding accounts and make sure equity accounts are correct. Things he struggled to get his US staff to do well. It went so well with a senior accountant, he hired another and then in a few months, another. Now not only is client work getting done on time, he he has room to grow. Good for you Jonathan. Here's a quote from Jonathan. We've hired very high level accounting talent stateside. I have to say that our Philippines based team is outperforming most of our US based staff. How dare you Jonathan. I was absolutely blown away with the type of candidates that we got from our job posting. Team up really helped us navigate the things we weren't sure of. That's Jonathan's story. A real live accountant just like you. For some reason we have this thing in our head. Maybe it's an American thing where you think when you hire somebody that's not in your country, they're not going to be as good as somebody in your country just because their power plugs look different. But that, you know, that just doesn't make a lot of sense, does it? If you're exploring hiring folks in the Philippines. If you are stuck on your your U.S. hiring strategy, hit up Team up link down in the show notes to help you find some super talented accountants in the Philippines. You'll get that client work straight out the door on time. Today's episode is sponsored in part by Live Flow, the company that puts a wee bitty QuickBooks button in your Excel or in your Google sheets. It's an extension that from Excel from your spreadsheet lets you pull in data from any client accounting file that you're connected to in QuickBooks. If you think about the recurring situations where you may be running reports out of QuickBooks balance sheet P and L ledger reports, maybe that's a month end close where you run a whole bunch of reports to a PDF for Excel and then mark them up. What else? Maybe you got consolidations, you do, maybe a bit of benchmarking. Oh, whatever those workflows are, our live flow lets you automatically build those reports or pull a whole bunch of those things like instantly in a templated way. In fact, I just shot an ad for a YouTube video which I think is a super cool use case where I built out like this whole month end package of all these reports that I need to close the books for the company. This big workbook with a bunch of tabs. But then to run it for the next company, all I have to do is literally just from a dropdown, select a different company and I can run the exact same workbook template but with the other company's data. Super cool link down in the show notes if you want to give those spreadsheets superpowers. Check out lifelong. I'm not as hung up on the moral dilemma of charging people this different prices. I think I'm not as hung up on that as some people, but that dilemma exists. There's. There's some sort of threshold there where I would be okay with some of it, but I wouldn't be okay with an astronomical amount of it just for that situation that we opened with. Two clients go out the door, they talk about their pricing, they come back, I'm going to feel awful. Should I not feel awful like the, the pure capitalist like answers? No, I probably shouldn't feel awful. But somewhere in there there's a, there's a threshold where I feel less good about it. And in learning that and kind of getting that understanding about myself and how I feel about it, I think the reality then is, since that is for me such a squishy thing, that there is no answer here that shouldn't be driven by, you gotta do what you feel good about. And if you absolutely can't get over that, then that, like that's 100% your decision. And the answer for you then ought to be, I can't do that now. That thinking might change. You might go to breakfast every week with a bunch of firm Owners who have no problems with that and by being around them in a couple years time, you're like, yeah, I don't have a problem with it anymore. And so you're thinking on that stuff may evolve. But I am, I'm personally unable to completely divorce myself from agreeing that there are some moral tie ins to just how far you can take that stuff. Who was it that said this? It might have been good old Vern Hoeven and they were talking about tax positions. Like sometimes it's just about like, can you say that thing with a straight face and look somebody in the eye and not giggle and not feel this like feeling in your stomach? And that's a situation where if it were taken too far to the extreme, I don't think I could. Now we still lean in value pricing. I value priced all the time. I didn't really have examples that were that extreme where it was 10x to 1x. But I know for myself there would be a threshold there where I got uneasy about it. Some more practical points that folks chucked in comment here, it's way easier said than done. And it's a nonstarter unless you have successfully and forcefully differentiated yourself. I'm always. That was kind of my, my biggest objection with value pricing for the longest time is oftentimes the conversation is led with pricing or maybe it's just in, you know, no context, social media conversations that it seems that way. But if somebody wants to come and tell you how to price this stuff, this all breaks down as soon as the client can go across the street and get more or less the same thing from somebody else. We talked about the landscaping example yesterday where we had three different landscapers and, and the third one comes in with this dazzling proposal that's all focused on outcomes and stuff like that. And you're like, you're going to choose the third one, right? And I think a lot of people would. I think the one who's trying to outthink the system is going to learn from the third one, go back to the second one and say, hey, here's, here's what that third person was going to do for me. Can you do this for me for like half the price? Now that may like piss you off because it's like, well then is the second person going to have like, are they going to be thinking about the important kind of value drivers for you in the same way that the third person would. Maybe not. And maybe that's where, you know, landscaping is a more simplistic example than professional services. Where there's so many ways that you could have a positive impact on the client's business. But absent some sort of differentiation, I can do this deep dive with the client and find all sorts of opportunities where they will find a tremendous amount of value in what I do. But if they are aware of substitutes that can do the same thing, who will charge a lower fixed fee or who will quote an hourly rate and an estimate estimate a number of hours that is less than what's going to cost for me to do that work, then unless I've otherwise dazzled them through some other conversation where they're like, okay, this person's value pricing, they're progressive. I can trust that there's going to be other positives that come out of this relationship because they're obviously a good advisor. Like absent some sort of other peripheral benefits like that, people are going to go to the substitute that is progressive, not pushing the envelope, not trying to value, price every single thing because they're probably going to get it for cheaper at that other shop. So your offering has to somehow be unique. You have to be perceived as, as one of one or at the very least you have to be able to eliminate the perceived substitute options that your customer is aware of. This One is from Mo. I think this is on LinkedIn. I'm sure people can relate to this. I'm stuck on finding a way to put the lipstick on the pig. Hard to sell value these days. It all starts with self belief, the whole, the quote that if you think that you're selling a commoditized, commoditized service then that'll be a, you know, a self fulfilling prophecy. There's a very real self confidence aspect of this where if you don't believe it's valuable for folks, you're never going to get them to believe it's super valuable. And sometimes we can actually be numbed to the value of it. When you have done it for a while and you don't remember just how much it stinks to get it wrong and what the cost to your business can be and what the actual sleepless nights are when you don't understand all of this stuff, sometimes you forget like just how much you help people because it's easy for you and you've been desensitized to just how much of a pain that is for other folks. But it all starts with delivering real value and being able to convince people of that real value. But before that you got to believe in it yourself. And I don't know if there's one tip I can give here. I can't. I can give two tips though. First tip, the biggest thing I ever did for my self confidence was start hanging out with other accounting firm owners. My reality when I, when I didn't know any other firm owners was entirely shaped by my clients, by my partner and the sort of things that clients would complain about. And that like, that was you didn't know anything different. And so you're like, yeah, am I being a jerk for doing that? Like, is that wrong? Like, should I negotiate that? Should I bend over for, like bend over backwards? And then you start having conversations with a bunch of other practitioners and kind of understand where you are in the ecosystem and what the norm is. Some traps to avoid things that, that they confirm for you. Oh no, those things are red flags. Like, you were right to kind of be suspicious of that. And when I started doing that, I came back with just a fundamentally different level of confidence. And the same can be said of how you price engagements too. Like we talk about mastermind groups and listening to the podcast and engaging in the comments and social media and stuff like that is totally going to give you valuable perspective of what other folks are doing and what the norm is. But it doesn't go to a level of depth where you get into more nuanced things like, like pricing and the right and the wrong time to fire a client. Like, this is where actual masterminds, where I developed super deep relationships with peers, became invaluable. You know, this, this, this framing I always come back to. When you see another firm that's doing something that's absolutely unthinkable to you, like charging 15 grand for a tax projection or charging 10 grand a month for bookkeeping, that's unthinkable for you because you just haven't done it yet. But if you had five friends for whom that was the norm and you hung out with those people every single week, it is just a matter of time before that becomes the norm for you as well. It's inevitable. When you are surrounded by that, we are programmed by what we consume. If you're around those people all the time, you're just going to pick all that stuff through osmosis and before you know it, that will be you. And what that means is you need to be really intentional about who you surround yourself with and acknowledge the value of relationships with people who do this stuff. Also, sometimes I don't think we recognize just how valuable it is to have those people in our lives and have relationships. And we don't make time to be hanging out with them every single week or meet for two hours once a month or something like that. When all of the problems that you have today somebody else has already solved. And we need to be thinking about how do I find the people who have already solved those problems and spend time with them? Because when you are surrounded by that, like, that just becomes you. Like, you evolve to that. And where this is at its worst is when you're feeling isolated and maybe you don't know people that do this stuff yet, maybe you're just a lurker and you're not engaging and stuff. And that is when it is at its absolute worst because you don't have any of those relationships yet or you haven't found the right relationships where it's the people that can push you and the people who are like a couple steps ahead on that journey. And we will all have these self limiting beliefs of like, oh, I'm, I'm not, I'm not of the level to be in that room. Like when I look at those people, like, that's not me. When it comes to firm running, there's so many facets of firm running that I would argue all of us have something to learn from just about everyone else. And so what you need to be thinking about is what facets do I excel at and what facets am I lagging at and how can I find folks who have got that figured out where I can pick their brain, I can spend time with them. So that, that becomes me. So that becomes embedded in me. When you're talking about confidence and going from where you are today to something better, man, there's no better way to do that than to spend time with people who do this stuff. And it's really unfortunate that there aren't more hubs out there enabling this. We do have a growing number of communities, which is awesome. But why am I pretty much the only person on YouTube talking about running small accounting firms? Like, if you've got Logan, Hector does it to a degree, but like, why is there not 10 times as many people doing this stuff? And I think in the near future there will be because more and more people are getting turned on to the value of this. But we gotta just, we gotta recognize just how extremely valuable that is for us to be reprogrammed by other professionals who are ahead of us on that curve that just overcomes so many problems. That was my first tip. Remember when I said there were two tips? That whole thing was my first tip. This episode is sponsored in part by Client Hub. Choosing a practice management system for your firm. It is. It is a big decision, arguably the biggest tech decision you make. Here is a way to think about it. Use the four C's. Isn't that a. Isn't that like a diamond thing? Like clarity, cut, carat and crunch? Boy, flashbacks to having to buy a diamond when I proposed to my wife. I think we're moving past that. I think fake diamonds have gotten good enough. Well, I remember one of those C's I totally maxed and just let all the other C's burn because they seemed less important. Where am I right now? We're in a Client Hub ad read. When choosing a PM, think about the 4C's capabilities, client experience, clarity and crunch, and community. Today we're talking capabilities. There are a lot of PM solutions out there that do a whole lot of stuff. Remember that roundup we did of all the different PMs? 14 of them compared hundreds of different features. But Client Hub specifically, it sets itself apart from the others with two sets of capabilities. One, it's built to support your cast slash bookkeeping work with QBO and Xero integrations built straight into the PM platform. And two, they're investing in AI that is artificial intelligence. You might have heard of it with magic email replies, magic workflow, magic answers. Starla. Is that her name? What's the wizard lady's name? Sharla Starlet? Starla Charmblaster. She's not here right now. It's about picking the right tools for your needs. Now, for a practice that's more tax or audit centric, there's probably better options out there than Client Hub. Wow, they just called out who they're not for props, but if your firm is founded on bookkeeping and client accounting services, ClientHub is a great platform for you. We're a small startup that's co founded by a former firm owner, top 100 pro advisor who knows the challenges for firms like yours. Learn more about ClientHub. Check out the link in the show notes. We've also done some demos of them on my YouTube channel. And thanks to ClientHub for sponsoring this episode. This episode is sponsored in part by Financial Sense. If you're listening to this and you don't have a practice management system yet, stop it. Hit pause. Stop using a spreadsheet and sticky notes. And I can do all this by memory. You just can't now. Admittedly, big problem with a lot of PMs. They started in a basic, humble place. A lot of them have gotten Pretty sweaty where it takes like a, like a PhD and computer changing stuff to get your firm onto this thing. Like it's hard. It requires an implementation specialist and like a whole team of people to get your team to the next thing. But Financial Sense, man, you can pop out of their website right now, just spin up a free trial. You don't need onboarding packages, all that stuff. It is easy enough where you can go out, take a first spin, see if you like it. If you don't, forget about them. Okay, but would they stand up a free trial if they didn't think it would work? Right. Okay, if you, if you've had concerns or maybe analysis paralysis on what PM do I do? Honestly, the quickest way to get information, go out, spin up a trial, use it for a week, see what you think. There are not very many PMs that will actually let you do that right now. Financial Sense is one of them. Check out the link in the show notes to learn more. Second tip on how to overcome, like struggling to put lipstick on the pig. Get more specific. The easiest way to be a good advisor is to just advise on a more specific domain. Nobody is a good advisor on anything. And this is a really hard thing when you're new, when you're building something from scratch and you're kind of taking anything and everything, it is exceptionally hard to be a good advisor because you're learning everything for the first time. And the reality is you just aren't a good advisor because nobody is on everything. What is a very, very specific thing that you have a stupid amount of, of knowledge about? I have a stupid amount of knowledge about rally cars. I used to race rally cars when I got out of college and there's like motorsport stuff around that and kind of how, how that ecosystem works where like just because of some turn that my life took, I have a bunch of knowledge around that. I've got a few things like that where it's like, yeah, I could totally go and have a conversation with an entrepreneur in that space and I would immediately understand them. I would know all the vernacular and I would be a really good advisor because I know all of that stuff and can combine it with the finance, with the tax, with everything else. And on day one, I would be a really good advisor for that type of person. Whether you have that skill set or not. Right now, every client engagement you do is an investment in yourself to becoming a better advisor down the road. And if every one of those investments are very scattered in all sorts of different things, you're not building yourself to something that will ultimately be really, really powerful for a specific type of person. So that fear of getting specific, the fear of all the things you're closing the door to when you're like, man, I can't even find clients right now. You mean to tell me that I need to be turning away 90% of them? That fear to do that is what is keeping you from finding the more specific client. It is not until we commit to saying we are for this person that we actually have something to say and people will actually find you. That generic messaging, that generic website, it is saying nothing. And even when somebody does come in the door because you're doing so many different things, like, it's just impossible to be a really good advisor. So the more specific you can get, the easier it's going to be to deliver multiples of value to a specific type of person in a way that the firm across the street could not. So if you're coming to the value pricing conversation as a generalist, that's always going to be a really big struggle because you've got substitutes everywhere, right? Biggest takeaways from me this week. If you are a student of the game, you got to read these books. You just do. Not that you're going to pull 100% of the things from it. It's going to change your life. But I 100% agree. If every one of us had a Ron Baker in our office, they'd be pricing everything and they'd be crushing it and they would be so good at it. So it is a very, very worthwhile skill to develop to be able to do this stuff. Arguably more important than anything else because that extra 2%, 10%, like that's going straight to the bottom line on every engagement. Now. It's a really hard thing to do in high volume cases. It's a really hard thing to train other people on. Not to say it can't be done, but it is more, a whole lot more work and requires some education in a way that more simple forms of billing don't, or I should say more simple forms of pricing don't. You made it through the week. Good job. I feel like we actually got through this week in a pretty civilized way. It didn't go as badly as I thought it could have. I can say having gone through this stuff, like spending a week going through kind of the old books and then the new ones, if I walked into my firm tomorrow, I would be better at this stuff and I think I would genuinely price things better than I would have before spending this week on it because I've, like, I've got the talk track down a little bit better. And I. I have the questions front of my mind that are good questions to ask that will get me to what will be a big driver of the decision for them. How does this make your business more profitable? Not the boilerplate stuff that I think many of us say around just the value of good financial reporting and stuff like that, but very specific to that business, understanding how the business works, how it makes money, and how what I do interfaces with that. I do think I'm. I'm better equipped than I was before going through that stuff. If you're thinking more about this stuff, highly recommend doing like a book club with your team and going through it together. That's like twice as powerful as you doing it yourself. You don't need yet another thing in your firm that only you can do. And there is a, like, multiplying effect, several people unlocking ideas at the same time and those ideas feeding off each other. That's really exciting, especially if you're like, please don't give me another job. Like, to see your team get excited about that and them see that as a career opportunity, to be able to execute on that and be like, oh, this just made me better at my job. I think that is totally worthwhile. Are there going to be boundaries there where you maybe don't push that to the extreme? In my case, I think there probably would be. But I can say I have learned. I've learned a lot going back through this stuff. And I had read all these books individually before, but just to like, fully put my head into it. And this is part of the fun of this podcast, is there's a degree of teaching to this and when you have to, like, speak to something, I don't know. This isn't that teachy, but there's enough of a teachy degree to it where, like, you kind of have to know your stuff to be able to present that to someone else. That is kind of a fun part of doing this podcast, is it forces me to maybe go deeper on it than I would otherwise do. And for me, that was a super valuable exercise, so I recommend you do the same. Still super valuable stuff for anybody that's running a professional services firm. Thanks for coming and hanging this week. Sharing your vulnerabilities on, like, what. What aspects of this are hard and make sense and don't make sense. That's kind of the value of having this conversation. That's it for today. I'll see you in the next.