291 9 Things Accounting Firms DON’T Have To Do Anymore

You ever heard that a firm is like doing a thing or not doing a thing, and it's just incomprehensible? You're immediately like, well, never in my firm, gang. We cannot be trapped by firms of our own creation. You've got your own firm. You've got the ultimate gift agency. What are you doing with it? Running a firm that looks exactly like everybody else's? Jason, it's a Monday. Get off my back. Okay, Today we're opening our minds some unthinkable things that if you really wanted to, you could stop doing because you don't like doing it or you want to focus on cooler stuff. So come on in, let's challenge some assumptions with nine things you don't really need to do if you don't want to. Now, I would argue that the reason that you don't need to do these traditional things is that today, more than ever before, you have the flexibility to run a firm on your terms. Not just because accountants are in demand and there's not enough firms out there and all that. That's definitely a factor, but because the world has gotten smaller, enabling a level of specificity that was never before possible before the Internet, before Al Gore gave us the ultimate gift. You can only build a firm just by hobnobbing around town and making friends and referrals and all that stuff. Now you can post a we tweet that that can find anyone in the world talking about beekeeping compliance for this specific species of imported bee. Some very specific nuanced thing. And algorithms are so good at sticking items to people with very specific interests that it almost goes without saying. But people still don't believe this for some reason. It ought to go without saying, if you think about the firm you could have built before, when you were just rocking up to Rotary meetings, when you were just going to local networking events. If you think about the firm that was possible then, boy, there's a very different type of firm that's possible now, right? A much, much more specific firm. And the more specific we get, the more painy pains we can solve, the more those clients then value what we're doing, and the more we can charge because of that specificity. But that same specificity, the same one that lets you serve a more specific type of client, will also let you deliver your service in a more specific type of way. You have more flexibility to have a non negotiables, things that you're just straight up not willing to do. I can't remember what his name was. There's Some, like, legendary Silicon Valley sort of software advisor guy where he basically does consulting sessions. 100 grand for an hour, and you have to meet him at his house. That's, like, somewhere in Arizona. And people do it all the time. They'll go down there, and they just meet with him, pay him 100 grand for an hour of his time. They rock up to his house, and that is how he consults people. And it's completely on his terms. And the reason that he can do it is because people think it's worth it. And because of a perceived lack of substitutes, they must not think they can get the same thing anywhere else or in a more convenient format. So if we're really gonna buy in, into the notion that we have this newfound flexibility, and if you're just starting out, maybe you don't feel like you have this yet, but if your firm's been around for a while, you're probably at capacity. You're probably thinking, what's the smartest way to get more selective? Consider these nine items that, on first glance, when most of us see it, we're like, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's not realist. Nobody can run a firm without that. Okay, number one, you don't have to answer the phone. This might be the most polarizing one on the list. There's like, this. This barbell, where on one end of the spectrum, you have a millennial who's like, who dare a client even call me on the phone? If you use your phone for making phone calls, you're not using it. Right? On the other end of the spectrum, you have most people who are like, what client is gonna come work with me if I won't get on the phone with them? Reality is, it's totally up to you. And the fact that we have Millennial and Zoomer accountants who are like, can I just run a firm and never have to hop on a phone call? Clients exist on that spectrum as well. So you're gonna have people who given to accountants if their preference is to just work over written communication. And one accountant will do that. And they say, this is the only way that we work that's gonna be appealing to them. And for the type of person for whom talking on the phone might be the most stressful thing imaginable, knock yourself out, man. Like, you got your own firm. You get to make the rules. The worst thing you can do is then go straight back out and build a firm that looks like everybody else's. Right? Okay, number two, you don't have to work with boring clients. The upside of being able to find that specificity is that, you know, micro niche is possible to a level that's completely different than before when it was all local networking. Right. And I've railed on this before. The whole life advice of don't make your hobby your job and don't follow your passions and the things that interest you. What incredible career advice that is. And it's not to say that there aren't ways to develop a passion for work, but if you're looking for a life model of how do I spend my time and do work that I enjoy, if there's something that you're passionate about and you love doing it, actively avoiding it doesn't feel like good advice to me. I used to work with dentists. I would talk to dentists all day long. And most of them were not particularly interesting people. And I got really bored of it. But there's other things that I'm way interested in where it's like, but can I just be in the room and hang out with you all? Like, I just. I love what you do so much. And if those were my clients and those are the conversations I got to have all day, every day, man, how cool would that be? Most of us have that interest in our life, or a few of them. And the really cool thing about accounting is that everybody needs accountants. Don't be afraid of creative agencies or construction companies or E Com folks like, cool, you made a great business out of it. But beyond a certain threshold, it kind of doesn't matter, like, very much. Diminishing returns on money beyond a certain threshold. And at that point you're like, am I actually having fun or am I just trying to build this thing for the sake of building it? But man, don't be afraid of figuring out how to go and work with people that you enjoy to do a version of work that doesn't feel like work. That is your ultimate competitive advantage is your interests. How good we are at things, getting prolific at a specific skill. It boils down to how much time are you willing to spend on it before you burn out. And when it's something you love, when it's something you have an interest in, that then becomes a competitive advantage. Cause you can do it doesn't feel like work. You go home at the end of the night, you and you browsing online, just reading about it because you love it so much, there's nothing else you'd rather do. That's what I learned for myself. Making videos. I just loved making videos. Turned out it was super fun. So where most people would hit a wall and give up or get bored, I'm like, I'm still having fun. So I'm grinding through it. And frankly, it doesn't feel like work these days. The volume of videos, that's it, is it? The vibe has changed. It is a little more worky than it was when I was running a firm. Oh, one more note. On the whole, working with people that you enjoy, your energy levels absolutely come through your work. You turn up on a meeting with a client, if you're stoked to be there, they're gonna know it. And if you're not stoked to be there, they're also gonna know it. You are genuinely at your best when you're doing something that you enjoy. Number three. You ready for this? This one's pipin hot. You don't have to email. Excuse me. Pardon me. Listen, this is your game. You get to make the rules. Let's say you hate email. You only want to talk on the phone. You only want to do stuff in person. Maybe you only want to do stuff in Slack or teams or Discord or WhatsApp. Whatever it is you like. That's totally up to you. Your freaking doctor will only ever message you in that their little secure patient portal, right? At the end of the day, it's up to you to make the rules of what you want to do and what you don't want to do. The email one, I think, is actually a little easier to navigate because you can have a whole team of people helping to manage your inbox. No problem. In fact, most of us should have that whether we want to email or not. Email is the number one thing on most accountants lists that they ought to be delegating. Talked about this on this. Talked about that on this pod before. If you're spending more than 20% of your day on email, boy, go out search that episode to get over this propriety we have over our email inboxes. That it's yours, that it's personal, buddy. It ain't. That's. That's like going to a manufacturing plant and saying, no. This receiving bay, it's all mine. No, it isn't. Your email is how work comes in and important stuff happens, and it's not just yours. Get help and get over. Get over becoming the person that needs an assistant or needs help. The surefire way to get in everyone else's way and screw up your company is to pretend you don't need help. Get help with your email inbox. That one honestly, people sending you emails, the replies to those emails by and large can be sent from your team. So that one's actually not too hard. This episode is sponsored in part by 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 he couldn't keep up. The problem was just couldn't find anyone in the US at a salary that he could really afford. Then he had an experience that opened his eyes. He hired his first accountant in the Philippines. Couldn't believe how good she was. Not only did she do the work well, 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 the senior accountant, he hired another and then in a few months, another. Now not only is client work getting done on time, 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, 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 wanna give those spreadsheets superpowers, check out liveflow number four. You don't have to do your least favorite service line. I think it was Brandon hall that said this on Twitter and it was like unthinkable that he has clients who he just sells tax planning to but does not do their annual tax return. Just think about that. He doesn't do their actual tax prep, just does the tax planning. Because the tax Planning you generally charge 5x the rates for. In fact, I don't mean to burn Brandon down here because he's probably coming on the pod soon, but a lot of his marketing is like your accountant doesn't do a very good job on tax planning because most of them don't. And they have this sort of comprehensive approach they use for real estate people where they do this big cool study and at the end of the day people happily pay for it. You could go out there and run a firm where all it did was tax planning. Not even tax write up, just the planning. If you run out of bookkeeping practice and you don't like payroll, you don't have to run payroll. If you love payroll, you could do payroll and nothing else. That was. I could hardly even say that sentence that was so wrong coming out of my mouth. If you got a service that you don't like, actually think about that right now. Think about all the different stuff you do. What's the least favorite thing and what's the most favorite thing? Delegate all but that favorite thing. And man, just cut, cut that least favorite thing. There are plenty of fish in the sea. Number five, you don't have to handle 100% of fulfillment in house. That is how you get the work done. Increasingly we've got contract groups we can work with. Who it's not people. It's not like employees you're getting. It is you are buying tax return preparations, you're buying month, end closes. There's a growing number of these super across the board in terms of corporate quality and highly dependent upon the people that you actually get in the end. Which makes this really hard. So I actually don't do any sort of sponsorships with contract groups. We do sponsorships with agencies that will help you hire people. But I don't do sponsorships with contract groups because you can go to a contract group and have a phenomenal experience if you've got good people doing your stuff or have an awful experience at the same group if you have people that aren't very good doing your stuff. That being said, at the end of the day, your job is to ensure that the work output is correct. And when people look at outsourced groups, be them onshore, nearshore, offshore, I think what people usually think is the quality of the work just. Just isn't good enough yet. We go out and we hire interns and we hire juniors and stuff like that. And boy, you want to talk about low quality of work. Don't act like you don't remember what your first tax return looked like. Your first month end close. Do you feel the same shame of that about that? That I do. I literally still feel shame about that. About just how awful it was. Those unforgettable review notes, like those still haunt me. I don't. You could. You could build like a whole review note therapy business. I'd hazard to guess that the notion of outsourcing any aspect of your fulfillment is one of those unthinkable things. But one of the smartest firm owners I know, she works with a collection of different outsourced groups. She is the face of the firm. She does all of the final review, she does all of the delivery. But it has kept her from having to hire virtually any team. And she uses several groups in case one starts not doing a very good job, then she shifts more work to the other one. And the quality of her work at the end of the day, in my opinion, is gonna be the exact same as it would be if she was hiring her own team. Definitely trade offs there around like, well, what if I wanna give my clients access to somebody besides myself? What if I wanna develop that person that's gonna buy me out someday? And there are for sure trade offs. But what would it look like to get help with 20% of your fulfillment? 5%, 50%? There's a whole bunch of different ways to do it. Number six, you don't have to do synchronous work. So synchronous work versus asynchronous work. Basically, synchronous work is the type of work where you have to be there, live with somebody else. Like getting onto a zoom call, getting on a telephone call, talking back and forth. Live asynchronous work is work where you don't have to be doing it at the exact same time as the other person. You get to it when you get to it. And asynchronous work is extremely helpful if you are trending towards a work model where folks can generally work from anywhere whenever they want. Because that whole utopia breaks down as soon as you have to get on meetings together. Most meetings super not necessary. Not a reason for all work to be synchronous. My companies are fully asynchronous. Very rare that we have live meetings. It requires really good written communication. It requires a really good definition of the scope of their job so that you have a yardstick to say either you're doing your job or you're not doing your job. But asynchronous work, I vastly prefer it because it gives me totally total flexibility over my day, over my focus. I could snooze my notifications for 8 hours if I just have to put my head down and like focus on getting some stuff out. But many people are so used to synchronous work and clients that demand synchronous things that it's unthinkable. The idea that you could ever get to a fully asynchronous firm where you're not having to take live meetings and phone calls with clients and all that. But just as there are people increasingly who prefer asynchronous work, you will have entrepreneurs out there that prefer the same as well. Number seven, you don't have to manage your team directly. There's a bunch of different types of CEOs out there and it's actually really interesting reading what different types of CEOs there are and the types of teams that you then build around them because it's kind of a, it's a product of their interests, of how they're wired. Has a big impact on ultimately how you build the right team. But one such example is the CEO who just has that right hand person and they basically work with just a single person. They're pouring everything into that one. Have a single direct report and then the next layer of, you know, executives or seniors or the next tier of the team. Maybe it's the whole team. If it's a small group, they work directly with that right hand person. Many of us don't particularly enjoy managing a team. I was super burnt out on it when I left my firm. But ultimately it's completely up to you how you craft that role. And while there's certainly value in developing relationships with your team and culture building and all that stuff, you can still do that without being those people's manager. A, you know, a chief of staff is a good example of someone who kind of serves as a buffer for you if you don't want to be the person doing all of that. These are a lot of these are kind of uncomfortable things where it's like, wow, really? Like that's kind of weird, but that's the idea. Like we are a product of the collection of assumptions that we hold right now to be true. And oftentimes getting to that next level means breaking those assumptions. Right? We talked about that some last week. Something's got to break if you're in a tough spot. And the good thing about that stuff breaking too is, is even if it doesn't end up being the right thing for you, you're going to learn something in the process that gets you closer to the right thing. The only thing that never gets you any closer is not changing, not experimenting. Two more here. Number eight, you don't have to use insert app here. I honestly don't think that there's a single app in all of accountingdom that we are required to use. If I think about the stickiest ones, your tax software. There's a number of tax software options. They're all horrendous talking US income tax prep. They're all terrible. But you could absolutely ditch one for another. QuickBooks is probably the most common example here. Man, there are so many insanely smart folks, firm owners that run wildly profitable firms that do not touch QuickBooks or any Intuit product. In fact, North America is really the only market in the world where QuickBooks is the market leader. So somehow the rest of the world is getting by without using QuickBooks. But for most American firms, like, moving away from Intuit still feels unthinkable for some reason. Ultimately, like what will drive the success of your firm is your positioning, your understanding of the type of client that you want to get and are you actually solving a meaningful pain for them, A pain that is specific to them. We can all solve accounting and tax problems, but if that's the only thing we communicate that we're not differentiating ourselves from anybody else, I'm going to communicate the problem specific to beekeepers. That's who I want. And that's the problem that I could develop an understanding of that the dude across the street wouldn't have an understanding of. Now, do I still solve the accounting and the tax related problems for my beekeeper clients? I for sure do. But if there's something very specific I can call out, that is the problem that they have more than most and I'm pushing that in my messaging. Sweet. Now I'm differentiated from the guy across the street and there's way fewer substitutes to me than there was before. And as soon as I, I have a degree of, of leverage in that relationship, a client can't come in and say, I think you should use this accounting app. Imagine that, letting a client tell you what like their finance tech stack should be. It is admittedly hard when they come to you and they don't know the difference of you from anybody else. And so if they come to you with FreshBooks or QuickBooks or Waiver or Xero or whatever it is the client wants to use and you're like, oh, sorry, we don't use that one. If you have no leverage, then for sure there is a risk that they go away as a result. But at the end of the day, you're making the rules and the stronger our positioning, the more leverage, the more leverage we have there. But it does always surprise me how much clients want to take the lead on what their stack like finance stack should be like. Really? Do you know how many people I work with? You think, you think you would be better suited to decide on this? For me, I actually lost a really big client on that. It was a whole group of dental clinics. And they were like, oh, we just, we figured out how to manage, figure out our whole receipt management and reimbursement problem here. We finally figured out a good platform for using, for doing reimbursements. And it was, it was something like concur. I don't think it was concur, but it was something like that where it was wildly overcomplicated for their needs and didn't solve the core problem. In my opinion reimbursements ought to be a thing of the past. Reimbursements, in my opinion were solved by card management. Platforms like reimbursements are a band aid for the problem that your employees, your team doesn't have a way to spend your money responsibly. But as soon as we got card platforms and DIVI was probably the very first one where it had the flexibility that you could really, like, set up virtual cards and physical cards with very, very strict limits. Now we have a lot more options. Ramp is probably the biggest one now. Not probably. They are just in, like, market size, but because I can now give a card to an employee where, like, if I'm sending them out to get donuts, I can put 15 bucks on it today. And you can never use it for anything else. That eliminates the need for employee reimbursements. So, like, that should no longer be a thing. Card management is the way to handle this going forward. But my client came to me and they're like, nope, we gotta do this. This will solve all of our problems. And at this point, we're running their whole back office. And I'm like, it 100% won't. Your options are to either take my advice, because I'm literally like a guru at this stuff, which I know you don't understand. It doesn't matter to you, but trust me, I know what I'm saying. Or if you want to do your own thing, then, like, this probably just isn't for us because we're not going to support some tech stack that you bring to the table. And they're like, okay, talk to you later. This was a client that we'd had for years, and it was. I don't know, it was a north of a. I don't know, it was like a $15,000 a month engagement or something in that vicinity. And they were like, okay, we'll go. We'll go figure out something else. I'm like, you really don't think that we know how to build your finance stack better than you do? 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, carrot 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? Wearing a Klein Hub ad read when choosing a PM, think about the 4C's capabilities, client experience, clarity and crunch. Now, in 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 zero 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 Starla. Starla Charm Blaster. She's not here right now. It's about picking the right tools for your needs. Now for practice, it'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, Client Hub 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've had concerns or maybe analysis paralysis on 1pm, 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. Okay, last one, number nine. You don't have to know how to do insert task here. I would say the the trap of the small business owner is never emerging from the need to be the expert at every single thing that's happening in business and being afraid to go into things that you are not the expert in. Every time you add a new thing it's like, okay, now I got to be an expert in the very best at this, and I got to be the best at this. And then you hire people that are kind of at a junior level at that thing so that you can still oversee them as opposed to acknowledging the value of something and hiring an expert for that thing to come enable that for your firm. And I get it, the risk is like, okay, what if I bring in that high level person, we start selling that thing and then they leave? For sure there's a risk to that, but oftentimes knowing how to do every single thing that's happening in your business is just not an option either. I've shared the story in the past of our our accounting firm, we changed tax softwares and if you're a U.S. tax person, you understand just how hairy this is. We had been on lesser for over 20 years. Lessert was on the struggle bus. We went to ultra tax because of all of the options that are all really bad options. That's probably the best if you need at least if you need like fairly technical stuff and if you're not like super budget constrained, like maybe not a super early stage firm, but we took a bunch of tax preparers with decades of experience, pulled the rug out from them and said you now have to prep tax returns over here. And it took so much time for them to get efficient in doing that because tax prep is just such a ridiculously complex thing to get your head around a new piece of software because of all the fiddly little inputs that you have to find for every little thing. And when we made that change, it was me and my partner were the only owners at that point. My partner was 100% heads down in the entire process. I on the other hand, said I'm transitioning out of client work. This was already in process. I don't need to know how to prepare tax returns. I know tax stuff. I did taxes for, oh, I did tax prep for 12 years and managed the business and still had all those conversations for another three or four years after that. But I said, I don't need to know how to use this tax software. And my partner was the kind of person where they have to know how to do all those things. And he had, you know, stories of, I just, I don't want to lose my relevance by not learning that thing. And my position was really the opposite, that I wanted to develop a more valuable sort of relevance by letting that thing go. And on the other side of this transition, questions would come up about the tax offer issues and all of these things. And this is a 40 person firm and they would all go to my partner for it. And I'm like, this is why, had you not gone through that process, it would have forced our hand to say, okay, this person is the subject matter expert or this person is handling our relationship with Thomson Reuters. And there's, there's so many examples of that where the team will come to you to bail them out. Maybe because in the past you've swooped in to be the hero or it's just easier than having to figure it out themselves. When really what we need to do is designate a subject matter expert for every tool, for every technical thing, for every service line. Unless it is somebody else's job to take the lead on that, it's going to default to you. And even when it's somebody else's job, when someone comes to you, you can say, well, whose job is that supposed to be? If it's nobody's job yet you need to write that down and figure out who's going to be in charge of this. But most of the time it already is somebody else's job. And I have to like, say, like, no, you got to go to this person for that. That's their thing. Like, that's what it looks like to delegate work in your firm and not be the boss of everything. And I stand by not learning how to use that tax software. I think it was absolutely the right thing to do. The people in my firm didn't understand it because they were coming from traditional partners who all did everything. And they thought I was like, I don't know, stuck up or they just couldn't understand that. And I'm like, gang, we've got a 40 person company with no middle managers and two owners. I don't have time to do client work. And ended up being the right choice. I'm just, I'm such a believer that high Output people and effective people. We see them and we're impressed by their output and we're impressed by all the things that they're doing. And we think, how could I ever do that? I couldn't. I can't imagine all of the things that have to go into that. And usually the secret is not the things they're doing, but all the things that they're not doing that you're still doing. So when I was publishing two videos a week on YouTube while running a 40 person firm, most people just didn't believe that I was running a $5 million practice. The reality was I had delegated way more stuff than most people had. It was because of what I was not doing that I was able to do those other things that I'd begun assigning a greater value to. And it all starts with, with deciding what you will not do, what you will not say yes to, and little bits of your firm that you can start carving out and being like, okay, I can trust the team with this. Another example of this we've been talking about is like, engagements. Below a certain size, if you have a whole bunch of clients and the fees range across a big spectrum, consider what the smallest fee clients are and pick a threshold around there to say, do I really need to touch clients that pay us less than $1,000 a year? Pick a number. The number's not important, but we're looking. I mean, start with the bottom 10% of your clients and say, can I trust this group to your team? And your team will be energized by this. It will push their skills and enable them to do new things. You might still be the puppet master behind the scenes, helping them respond to emails and doing all that, but that's progress. That's a good thing, rather than you doing it yourself. And most of the time what we find is when we're willing to give away that 10%, which is a size that's small enough to where if it went totally sideways, it wouldn't hose us. So you're willing to kind of make that test. When that 10% goes actually just fine, then you can start thinking about 15%, 20%, 25%. But you can't get to 25% until you start with 10% and learn how to do it well and what works about it and what doesn't work about it. And is that person on my team really capable of overseeing that? No, but this other person really stepped up. It's by tiptoeing into that that you learn what that better next step could be, but it all starts with that tippy toe. Have you got anything totally off the wall that you would love to not do? Or maybe something that your firm just straight up doesn't do that a lot of other firms do? Maybe you take some heat for it or it's unique. I would love to see that in the comments. Sometimes I think we get too sucked into the norm of what everybody does in their firms and what everyone else's firms look like when it's like, man, this is actually a killer opportunity. We got our own thing, we can make it whatever we want it to be, a reflection of ourselves, and that's a cool opportunity that we sometimes don't give enough thought to. What is, what is my unique version of this? Pop that in the comments if you got a good example of that. Man, the comments have been absolutely popping off lately. So many things and connections happening in there. If you're lurking, don't be afraid to jump in. Thanks for coming and hanging today and I'll see you in the next one. Sa.