295 How To Close More Sales in your Accounting Firm

Maybe you can relate. Closing deals. That's not a thing that really comes natural naturally to accountants. So how do we get better at this? How do I. How do I pack into my client's thick skull how valuable the work that I do is so that they value it the same way that I do? Or is that even the right way to think about it? The notion I have to have to convince them of why they should pay me to do this stuff. Shouldn't they just appreciate me? Also? You've decided you want to pull a partner into your accounting firm, but how do you find them? I've got some nice peanut butter, but where do I find some jelly? Thoughts on buying out retiring firm owners? Is accounting still worth studying in 2024? In this economy, AI is just around the corner. Software companies beating down our profession. Let's talk about it. Come on in. It's Q and A Friday. This one feels relatable. Hey, Jason, Love your stuff. I watch every video. Oh, you stop that. But do you listen to the pot or do you only watch the videos? We love a video on how to sell. Slash close sales. That's something we're struggling on. Communicating value to show it's worth more than our fees. This question came up when we spent that week on value pricing. We do provide a lot of value. It is a pain point. But oftentimes clients don't understand how much of a pain point it is or how much relief we provide. I know the obvious answer here is either we're not really addressing their pain points or we should only work with people whose pain exceeds our fees. But sometimes that's the case and we have trouble communicating it. Okay, tip number one, I can give you that most of us aren't doing and it can be tricky. But the more information we can gather about our nose about the. The reason why our clients specifically gave us a no, the more information we can capture around that, the better. And most people, most entrepreneurs, if they've actually gone through a process of giving you information and you've built a little bit of a relationship there, if they're business owners and they understand like the value of systems and feedback and all of that, most of them will go through like a 90 second form to give you some feedback on why they ultimately decided not to work with you, full stop, like first things first, that's a really, really viable thing to start capturing. And value Pricing Week, we talked about all of these sources of clients resistance to paying your fees. And I mean that value pricing stuff, like it is so academic. It is a massive list of reasons why folks may not want to pay them. And there are actionable things that you can do to decrease the likelihood that any of those individual things end up blocking a client from buying for you. There's stuff we can do to mitigate, like all those different risks. And the value of capturing why they said no points to something that is probably lacking in your sales process, where if you know 30% of these no's are coming back and saying it was a no because of this, that's incredible feedback. Because we can go back to our sales process and say, how do we bolster this aspect of what we communicate to overcome that no? And man, all it takes is asking a few of those questions. And if you close one more deal that you really want, that you wouldn't have otherwise gotten, that is so, so worthwhile and more like high volume context, like software companies where they're dialing this stuff into the extreme. How do we, you know, close 110 of 1% more potential users? This is the data that they're looking at, like what caused them to bounce? How far did they get into the process before they left? What did they look at? What did they click on? And so anytime we go through the discovery process with a client and they end up bouncing, it is so worthwhile to capture that information. Now, to dig into this question in this commentary, specifically because I think a lot of people can relate to this, I wanna call out this one statement that's something we're struggling on, communicating value to show it's worth more than our fees. We do provide a lot of value. It is a pain point. But oftentimes clients don't understand how much of a pain point it is. So at the end of the day, the only perception of value that matters is that of your client. And that's a frustrating thing to accept because we, honestly, we probably have sometimes an overinflated notion of what our own value is because we've seen how badly it can go off the rails and because we've seen the worst of the worst. And in many ways, our firms collect the worst of the worst because we're seeing the world through that lens. We're like, no, no, no, no, no, you gotta get this stuff right because it can really go sideways on you. But no amount of my conviction is gonna cause them to write a bigger check unless I am successfully projecting my conviction onto them. And so why are these people not valuing us enough? Well, the place I tell people to always start is look at your client List and understand why some of those people value you and why some of them don't. It all starts with a really deep understanding of what are the reasons why people value me. And that's not tied to bookkeeping solves this problem. Tax solves that problem. Receipt management and bill pay solve these other problems that is tied to their business and their business problems and how their business makes money, how their owner wants to spend their time. It is specific to them. It's nothing about us like the services we deliver can solve for these things. But we have to see it uniquely through the lens of that business. So example, I've shared quite a bit. One of our happiest clients who absolutely adored us and sent us the biggest gift back skits every holiday, we charged them top dollar. They were one of our, our best paying clients, but they were by far and away happier than anybody else. And that was because this person had spent the last 15 years going through internal hires trying to get them to do the work that we were doing for them. They've gotten burned so many times that they had a deep, deep, intimate understanding of the cost of it going wrong. And when they came to us, man, they were ready. They just wanted to have that stuff out of their hair because they truly understood that pain. And so if I look at my client list and I see, okay, this is an A client. Why do they feel this pain so acutely? Okay, it's this reason then that's some great messaging to pull into my marketing. I want to go after people that have that specific pain. So what are some like kind of hero headlines that could attract more clients like that? In this case it was a dentist trying to get their practice manager to do the bookkeeping and stuff like that. Just think through like some one liners of how you could find more folks like that. Because your, your practice manager isn't a bookkeeper, because your office manager has better things to do with their time because you should be chairside not building a back office, stuff like that. So that was why that person valued us. Now you'll notice in that example that did not require me require of me to convince them of my value. And this is like I learned in that week, kind of a core tenant of value pricing is the importance of you being able to convince the people of that value. And man, I'll be honest, that's a lot of work. Now there's certainly like education we can do and as part of our marketing we can give them a bunch of information that will absolutely increase their perceived value. Of what we do. So. So a degree of that I'm totally on board with. But an alternative school of thought you take like what Alex Hormozi talks about in his book A Hundred Million Dollar Offers, which we've talked about quite a bit on this pod. Super easy, quick read, highly recommend A Hundred Million Dollar Offers. Really good. The entire premise of building A Hundred Million Dollar Offer is you identify existing pains that people already have that are rare. The rarer the pain, the more valuable and and are felt by people that have money to pay for a solution. Now, we talk about rare pains a lot here because when it comes to positioning your firm, we can all say generic maxims about the value of having good bookkeeping and a good tax pro and stuff like that. But the better version of that is what does that enable specifically for beekeepers? What's a creative agency specific problem that arises if you don't have that help? I want to have an offering that is so specific that the dude across the street with an accounting firm can't go, oh yeah, we do that too. That's just accounting and tax. I'm looking for a pain that is rare. And I'll be honest, in the age of I've been thinking about value pricing and what of that ought to be changed by the age of social media and the power we now have to attract on a global scale in a way that wasn't possible before. I think one of the things that changes is, is if we can find that very specific pain, we can now find people and attract people that have it. Using social media, using content, using podcasts, stuff like that, we can attract the folks who are acutely feeling that pain and actively looking for a solution. So that dental clinic owner who had struggled with office managers trying to get them to do their bill pay and correctly make the retirement contributions with each payer on all these different things, I could build an entire campaign around down with trying to get your office manager to run your back office. And that's a pain that a ton of dentists are acutely already feeling. When that office manager could instead be working on billing or booking more appointments, like more important stuff that's going to drive the profitability of the business. You look at a, I don't know, 80, $90,000 a year office manager, I can come in and for a third to a half of the cost of that person, say I'm going to save this person a ton of time or we're gonna manage it all for you and do a much, much better job than they ever could have. That's a really compelling offering for the people who are already feeling that pain. I think if there's, if there's a big thing that's changed since kind of the original value pricing stuff came around. It is a newfound power to attract people who are already feeling pains, like specific pains, very acutely. And when we find those pains, that's a golden opportunity. Usually they're buried in like clients who love us. And maybe we don't quite understand why it is they love us yet, but. But when you find those things, they are like gold nuggets. You gotta mine those things. Because if one of your clients feels that pain, and that's why they will happily pay you top dollar, there are a hundred, there are a thousand more people just like that feeling that same pain. And if today that's one client in my client list of a hundred, Imagine if all a hundred clients were that person. I mean, my firm would have been 2 to 3 X's profitable. We would have had pears coming out of our ears every holiday season, and everybody on the client list would've been stoked to work with us. Right? So to round this out, in my, like, in my opinion, there is no single answer to this problem. Why do my clients not value me as much as I value what we do? It's life circumstances, it's nuances in their business. It's all those things. But rather than standing up a set of offerings and saying, we do this stuff now and like putting your shingle out, I much prefer going on the attack and looking for specific pains and attracting people and finding people who have those specific pains. And a great place to start finding them is within your client list, looking at the folks who most appreciate you right now. If we're not like, I mean, you can run an accounting firm. Not going on the offensive like that. For sure, that's 95% of accounting firms. But as long as you are just sitting back and taking what comes in, it will be much less specific than if you are going out to target specific things. And the more specific stuff we can target, the better people will pay us to do that work. This episode is sponsored in part by Live Flow. Boy, if you've been around this podcast, you know we have run a lot of live flow ad reads. You cut this podcast ad feed and it bleeds Live flow ad read. In fact, you know what we should do? Hang on. I had a whole ad read for this, but I just got a better idea. You know what we should do? You know, we Made that JSON bot that's like connected to all the podcast episodes and you can ask it questions and It'll go across 280 episodes and give you answers. Let's just make. Ooh, let's make a bot that's just all my Live Flow ad reads and then I can just ask it questions. I have this workflow problem. How could Lifflow help me? I spent a bunch of money on a reporting platform. Is this something that LifeFlow could have done for me instead in a spreadsheet? Because that's where I'm actually happy and comfortable. What's the easiest way to connect my spreadsheets to my clients? QuickBooks data in a single click and the chat assistant would be like Live Flow. No it wouldn't. It would be like, oh man, I hear you. Oh, that's a real tough situation. You got yourself there. Here's what you're going to do. And it'd be like a two paragraph long way of just saying Live Flow could be good content though. We should put something useful on this ad. Read Live Flow. It's the easiest way to liberate data from those client QuickBooks file files. Whether you're in Excel Google sheets, you get a little Live Flow button. It's like an extension. You click, click that guy and you can run all your favorite QuickBooks reports. Sync that data into QuickBooks like a one time sync or an ongoing like rolling sync. Do like some, some kind of real time reporting stuff. Great way to get data out to stakeholders who you don't want to have access to the QuickBooks files. Also be a banker, an advisor, employees of the business, quite possibly even the business owner themselves because they keep breaking things. That is Live Flow. To learn more about that one, check out the link in the show notes. This episode is sponsored in part by Teamup. What if you went out and you hired an offshore person and they took some sensitive information, they did something bad with them, they stole. Oh, worst case scenario, right? How do you manage that? So to start some advice from Team up here, according to Teamup, the number one and number two mistakes accountants make. Number one, thinking of your overseas teammates as, quote, offshore staff, thinking of them as something else rather than just an extension of our team that is subject to the same rules and restrictions and controls as anybody else that I hire, whether they're onshore or offshore. Mistake number two, making global teams more complicated than they really are. The three things team up always says, one, it's just people. Two, build relationships of trust over time and Three. What would you do if you hired an Arizona? Wow. Why the heat for Arizona, not Florida or something like that? You hire somebody in Arizona, you probably don't stay up all night worrying about them, right? And the same should be true with your team in the Philippines. Hire the right people, get to know them personally and give access to non sensitive info first. Feel like there's more a question of internal controls. Like we are accountants so we don't really rely on trust so much, right? We don't just fling open the keys of the castle for anybody to come get it. That's not an ad copy. That's my take. If somebody in the Philippines is gonna steal from me, it's because I put them in that position. Just like if I hired anybody, everybody across the country. Instead, focus on the positive. Don't get too wrapped up in fear and scarcity. Be logical about thinking through those problems and coming up with solutions for them. To protect yourself not only from offshore hires, but the rest of your team as well. Learn more about Team Up. Check out the link in the show notes. Thank you to team up for sponsoring this episode. A quick update. A couple weeks back we did a podcast about just like how to make friends in the space. And someone posted in the comments, they're like, this is me not being a lurker anymore. And they've been super active since then, which is fantastic. But in that comment section on, on in the comments on the YouTube video for one of these podcast episodes, three or four people got together who are all like side hustlers who are kind of in the transition of trying to get to running their own thing. They all got connected in the comments. They're now all meeting outside, like with each other, which is just. It's amazing. Like, it's the power of not lurking in a single image. You can see it. Since then, I've had no fewer than 10 people DM me to say, hey, who, who are those people? Can you get me in that thing? Can you? I'm doing a side hustle sort of thing too. Can I be a part of it? And it's, it was such. To me, it's such a cool validation of the fact that everybody is looking for community. And I'm not, I'm not saying community as in paid big structure sort of, nothing like that. I'm saying community as in finding more people like me who do what I do so that we can share ideas so you don't feel so isolated. Man, everybody is looking for that, but we are stuck on, I think we are just like wired for pre Internet, thinking of how many people are out there and how contextual their problems are. Because we get comments on videos that are things like, I don't know if there's anybody else feeling what I'm feeling. I don't know if there's anybody else that's in this stage struggling with how do I launch a side hustle when I can't totally be out there because I still have a job. If you're feeling that there are thousands of other people feeling that, that's the power of the Internet. And as long as you're lurking and sitting back and just wondering, does anybody else feel that we're never going to find the people who also like share that same feeling. It's not social media marketing, it's not zero click marketing having a social strategy. It is being a citizen of being a service professional in 2024. The reality that society these days, everybody spends almost all of their idle moments scrolling an algorithm. And we can either choose to be present there or actively choose to not be present. But the more visible we are, the more those opportunities are presented to you folks learn about what you're doing. You don't even have to be selling anything. But that visibility absolutely pays off. Obviously, you know, it's changed my life, so I'm biased there. But that was a super cool example of somebody saying, this is me no longer being a lurker immediately. Within a week, they're meeting with several other people that are running side hustle firms just like them, already getting value from that and building relationships. And then as soon as I started talking about that, two times as many people come out of the woodworks and they're like, oh, me too, me too. Can I come hang? I love that stuff, man. That is the very best of the Internet. Related. I got a DM about how to find a partner. They're building their own firm, but don't wanna do it themselves. They wanna pull a partner. And I think it was for like a specific type of technical expertise that maybe they lacked and they're just kind of generally curious where to look. I'll give you largely the same answer here. Your ability to find the right fit is largely going to be a product of your willingness to be visible and to put yourself out there. The more visible you are. Like every single social media post, it is like a pull of a cosmic wheel of chance where the right person might see it, might send that DM that day because they were reminded that you existed. And before you know it it takes a wild turn. Almost all of the professional relationships I have now have happened just from getting connected with like minded folks online. I mean, I met my wife online, but we're still afraid to like engage with online for some reason. So number one, be visible just because that will enable things that will not just make connections for your professional career and firm right now as it currently stands, but for the rest of your life. There's people listening to this podcast who I will have and maintain a relationship with for the rest of my life. I got no idea what I'll be doing in 20, 25 years, but there are many of you listening here who I will still know, who I will still hang out with, who will still be posting comments, and I may be posting comments on your videos. Just think of the compounding impact of that over time and prioritize that so that you start investing today. You make the decision to not lurk and trust that even though you can't do this explicit ROI calculation, that leaning into that serendipity and the chance that it could enable some things for you makes all that worthwhile. And I can tell you it is a whole lot more fun. And I'm saying this as a big time control freak. In hindsight, it has been a whole lot more fun than trying to will some future timeline, future reality into existence. If your two options are, and this was my case, try to win the game as it's defined by everyone around me. And that was working at a small firm of about 30 people and trying to get to partner. That was the game I was plugged into. Cause it was the only one that I knew and it was the one that everyone around me was impressed by. So when you're embedded in that environment, you're drinking the Kool Aid just like everyone else. Meanwhile there's 7 billion other people on this planet and in all likelihood you you did not get placed down into the very best situation for you, like the most optimal thing. But as soon as we can get ourselves out of that tunnel vision for your current circumstances and just start having conversations with other people, you get such a healthier level of perspective on what's out there anyways, how to find a partner. One other thought here is if there's something specific you're looking for in a partner, obviously taking on an equity partner is like the highest stakes the you could possibly do. It gives me palpitations just thinking about it because boy is that it's just like it's another marriage and you, like me, may wake up some Mornings and think, man, I already got one too many of those. I'm only saying that because I think my wife can hear me right now. My heart rate is like 180 beats per minute. But an alternative to, like, going full bore pulling in an equity partner is if you're looking for something specific, say you're a bookkeeper and you want to start offering tax. You want to pull in a partner that can oversee, like a tax team. Why not instead start with. With a partnership with another company that does that stuff, like with a tax firm, something like that. It may develop into something that involves equity down the road, but it certainly doesn't need to start there. So the old like, walk, walk, jog, run. Is that a thing? There's something like that. That's. That's a thing. But the solution there and how you put it together is the same. Be visible. See if you can build a partnership that will help you to get a version of that in your firm, maybe without having to go whole hog on equity. All right, a couple more here. Buying out a retiring firm owner. This is from Shelley in the comments. Thank you, Shelley. Jason, what advice do you have? Maybe you already have a video on this for buying a firm? I'm considering starting my practice by looking for someone ready to retire. I don't want partners. Short term's okay, I think for the. For the person they're buying. Hanging around. Short terms, okay, but not for more than a year. Is a purchase even necessary for these folks? That's a good question. Honestly, we had a pretty solid discussion on this on social media a couple of weeks ago. Couple of weeks back, in fact, I put out a poll basically saying, I'll set up the context here. I said, with loads of legacy small firm owners nearing retirement, the growing supply of antiquated firms available for sale will likely be greater than the number of people wanting to take on the challenge of modernizing such a firm. Does this mean A, you shouldn't buy legacy firms? They've got nowhere else to go, swoop the clients when they leave or the owner retires? B, keep buying legacy firms. It's the right thing to do and still a great way to start building a practice, or C, buying a legacy firm isn't worth the effort to begin with. Too much change management. Interestingly, 41% of people said it's still okay to buy legacy firms. 20% said you shouldn't buy them because the firm's got nowhere else to go. And then another 20% said it's not worth it because it's too much change management. So if you combine anc, which is basically don't do it, it's pretty much a dead heat with still okay to buy. So people seem pretty much 5050 split on that D was results. That's why my math doesn't work out there. But that's in my opinion at least in the US which is I'm much more familiar with than anything else. The landscape right now is you have a massive amount of retiring firm owners who are running antiquated firms paperwork, paper files. They are involved in all of the relationship management for their clients. Oftentimes their pricing is is wildly inadequate. They're white knuckle in it to retirement, many of them hoping for some sort of buyout and kind of staking their retirement in that but as a result have deferred making some really hard decisions within their practice which puts a new owner in a super tough spot. And if you have ever tried to get a team of accountants, many of whom will have decades of experience doing work a certain way, like with paper work papers or with the software tools that they like that are not modern software tools, if you've ever had to go through the experience of getting a team of accountants to completely rewire their brain to do that work a different way, it is a monumental challenge. And even if those folks do their darndest, the reality is it sucks because it actually is really hard. There is a ton of muscle memory that goes into preparing a tax return doing a month end close. There are certainly accountants who are change averse. But even when they are at their best, and it just takes a lot more time than you expect for them to be productive to the level that they once were again. So there is no come in, pull the rug out, change a bunch of tech and hit the ground running. Unless you're bringing with you an entirely different team and you plan on clearing house, maybe that is the quickest way to turn over your workflows. The rub is these days to run a super efficient firm a lot of your workflows are client facing. Because so much of running an efficient firm comes down to how effectively do we exchange information and gather stuff from clients. It means a lot of our tech is now connected to our clients, which makes it harder to change that tech. If I got to retrain 500 different clients on how to use a portal, so even if I came in, pulled the staff out, put my own staff in, pulled the systems out, put my own systems in, I just bought a bunch of clients, do any of them want to work with me. Do all of them appreciate the old system, the old relationship they had with the last owner? He's probably going to look, was probably going to look very different to that of, of the new relationship. It is really hard for me to make a case for buying a legacy firm because there's just going to be a day where they close up shop or they sell for a fire sale price. But I don't know how valuable those clients are because they're not used to working with modern tools. This episode is sponsored in part by Stanford Tax and I'm sorry if I sound upset today or a little emotional. I just got the news that we lost someone that was very near and dear to all of us. If you came of age in this profession doing tax work, Stanford Tax, they just killed the paper organizer. You know, the paper organizer, you print out of your tax software and you send it out to your clients. It's big and it's dumb and it doesn't make any sense. And I ask them a bunch of pointless questions, but it's dead and it's never coming back. Okay, Stanford Tax. It gives you a modern way to gather the same information using pro forma info from your tax software. Like it will actually intelligently ask the questions that need to be asked, taking into account that pro forma data, so that on January 3rd every year you aren't cleaning out the local staples printing out umpteen reams of paper organizers, only to mail them to your clients and never get them back. We did a demo day of Stanford tax on my YouTube channel where you can see how it works in five minutes. If you're still using paper organizers, please stop. Please, please just stop it. I know you're still working on extended 1040s, man, this is the time to be kicking the tires on new tax tools. So you're not going in blind to next tax season. So you know exactly what you're working with and what'll work and what won't work. So by the time you get to next January, you are absolutely humming. Okay, if you do tax stuff, check this one out. Stanford Tax. I'll put a link in the show Notes. 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 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, 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 demo days on my channel now with Maker's 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. Maker Sub 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 MakerSub. Put a link in the show notes now. There are also a growing number of progressive firms and these things are in my opinion are freaking unicorns, are like diamonds in the rough. So, so rare. We all me, you, everyone in this little bubble we are in such an echo chamber of progressive thinking that I am constantly reminded every time I step out of the Internet conversation bubble, I'm reminded of how light years ahead we all are from the norm, which is great. But even as we are aspiring to do something better and oftentimes we fall on our face and it doesn't work out. And I'm. That's as true for me as it is for anybody. Step one is to like have the mental model of for what you want to build. Step two is to like actually do it and, and actually create the Starship Enterprise, which is arguably the harder one. But for the people who are doing this and doing it well, I want those firms like those are absolutely worth acquiring. I'm generally like anti acquisition because I think it almost always hurts the team, it almost always hurts the clients. If I'm the owner and I hire a bunch of people who are like, okay, I bought into your vision for running a firm and my goal is to then leave them flapping in the breeze, that doesn't feel like a great outcome for me. That being said, if they can go to other like minded people. And there's a few examples of this that I've seen in the wild now where it's people not in my community directly, but kind of that adjacent bubble, this sort of echo chamber that we're hanging out in. I've seen a few firm transactions happening within this bubble now and man, that gets me stoked because they're going from a great firm owner to a great firm owner. And that's actually really interesting to me. The thing that sucks is the firm going, you know, selling to a regional, something like that, where it's like a lot of people end up leaving and that doesn't generally end up being good for anybody. I would love to see more of this. I mean, I've talked about how we've, we've waded into this a bit with my. I've got a placement offering jason.careers where basically I place accountants in my audience who work for legacy firms into firms in my audience like progressive firms. Because I know when I first started learning about progressive firms, I'm like, that seems super cool. But I don't work for a progressive firm and I don't know any. So what do I do now? And I'm trying to help with that. And we've actually got a ton of people that have come through this platform, which is really exciting. The fact that just in a little bubble of people who watch my content were able to connect Progressive people with progressive firms. I think that's just gonna keep growing, honestly, because we've got an entire generation of people who are living much more online and living much more connected with each other and in community. So that hiring this is gonna be more of a thing, but also firm acquisitions, firm rollups, firm partnerships, more and more that's gonna be happening within this bubble and man, I'm totally for it. So buying out a retiring firm owner, I wouldn't do if it was. I wouldn't do it if it was a legacy firm. I would probably do it if it was a progressive firm. But. But always remember the trade off of buying versus building your own thing is buying will always be transitional. It'll never be like set up the way that you would have designed it from scratch. And that's going to take time to steer that ship. In most cases, you will cash flow faster by buying, but it will take longer to bring it around to what you wanted it to be. As opposed to building your own thing from scratch. Which on paper in theory is great because you have total control, right? But talk to a firm owner who built their own thing from scratch that didn't throw out the playbook and change it 20 times in the first three years. It is not as if you're gonna launch something from scratch and be like, yep, this is the solution and scale that to 10,000 clients. Either way, you're gonna be iterating through a bunch of different things, pros and cons to each. Okay, last one. Let's end it with a softball. Is accounting still worth studying? It's not a softball. I kid. This was from Derek. Dock on a. I think it was a main channel video. Is studying accounting still worth it in 2024? Or am I gonna enter a job market with lowering demand because of AI? AI is looming over not just accounting. AI is looming over every form of white collar work. It's looming over creative work. Arguably creative work is most being disrupted by AI right now. Things like voice acting. So it's not just an accounting thing, it is a, it's a big picture thing. But if I put all those professions on a list and I say what's the most likely to get disrupted? The one thing that we will always have, no matter what, is we'll still have regulation, we'll still have reporting requirements as long as we have financial markets. And like, is there a universe where AI removes all of the barriers to entrepreneurship related to accounting or related to compliance? We're still going to have governments, we're still Going to have politicians. That just seems exceedingly unlikely. Which means we still need accountants. Will the way that we do our work change? Absolutely, it for sure will. Most exciting this year to me is, is AI Vision Models and how that's changing stuff like accounts payable. How it's changing stuff like specifically 1040 tax prep. Taking away a bunch of the grunt work, like all of the stuff that I did when I was an entry level 1040 person, like AI vision models can pull all that stuff off of the docs and put them into a structured workpaper and get them into your tax software. That's great. So there's a moving target of, well, what will the entry level people do? It's kind of always been the case. Like entry level people back in the day were running 10 key tapes to foot things and we got by just fine when they didn't have to do that anymore. Right. So what entry level is, will continue to evolve. But right now we have a massive shortage in the profession. That only stands to get worse as we have a huge percentage of. I don't know if it's CPAs. They say like 2/3 of, I think it's CPAs that are set to retire in the next five to ten years or something. Just like pretty scary statistics where when all those people go like, holy smokes. In some ways it's bad if you're in the space. I mean, it's also like massive opportunity. Like you're so in demand already, you're just gonna be even more in demand. And we need more creative ways to pull people into the profession. Not just undergrads, but career changers and stuff like that. I think the growth of productized solutions like Bench and Pilot and QuickBooks Live Bookkeeping and TurboTax Live, honestly, AI will make those even better. So they will continue to come up market, which is fine because right now I'd argue there's a huge gap between productized solutions and how much it costs to get help, like good help from a firm. And if those productized solutions keep coming up market, we're seeing now TurboTax Live is charging well over $1,000 for business tax prep. That's great. That's increasing the floor for professional firms where people will come in and get a relationship with an actual human being they can come back to every single year and get a higher level of service, probably a little more expertise. Those productized services are pushing up the floor for how all the work gets done. But the growth of them, I would argue, is pulling a more diverse cast of people into our ecosystem of talent. Because many of these jobs come with great flexibility. You can work part time hours, you can work from home. Many of the best people that I ever hired into my firm came from services like Jackson Hewitt and H and R Block and stuff like that. So these productized services, I think can actually pull people into the profession. And those productized services will have limitations on how high somebody can go. In all likelihood, they ultimately leave, they start their own firm, they go to work for a more traditional firm, that sort of thing. And I think that's, that's good for all of us. But looking at the ecosystem in the industry as a whole right now, anybody who is in here at all will tell you it is a great time to be an accountant. Now, I think the only scenario where I totally eat my words there in three to five years is when AI gets to the level that drastically impacts all forms of knowledge work. And that is like a civilization level change, not an accounting level change. I don't see accounting right now being particularly more exposed than many of the other things that are exposed. But if it does go sideways, it's because AI is doing loads of stuff. You got like massive societal shifts happening. It's not just an accounting thing at that point. So go study accounting. I love that we've got like a whole generation of people that, that are tuning into this content, a huge percentage of whom are not yet firm owners. I mean, I hold this stuff all out as it's content for firm owners, but at least 50% of the people that listen to this podcast are staff for somebody else. They're not firm owners. Maybe they're managers. Maybe they're thinking about running a firm someday or they just want to like wire their brain to think like a firm owner because they know that'll make them a better team member. What I love is that we have an entire like generation of folks coming through this sort of way of thinking more progressively. Many people that listen to this stuff already own run firms. And hopefully by putting all this content out and trying to create places for people to connect, hopefully the folks that are running firms are growing and those firms are getting more progressive. But what I'm really excited about is that next generation of people who aren't there yet, who just have a fundamentally more mature framework for how to run a firm well than the last generation did. And I'm not saying that's me, I'm saying that's a bunch of things happening. That's social media, that's online, that's people being able to communicate and share ideas with each other in a way that was never possible before. That's extremely exciting. But I look at the resources that are available now that I would have killed for a decade ago when I was six or seven or eight years in. It's awesome. And it can only serve to make the accounting profession better down the road and help us to not just be great technicians, but solid entrepreneurs and managers and run profitable businesses because we're able to share with each other and have greater transparency in the right ways to do things and all that. And people like you turning up for stuff like this, asking smart questions, it makes everybody better. So thanks for coming and being here. Let's do this again next week, huh? That sound good? I'll see you there.