310 A Better Client Experience to Drive PROFIT

The last thing I want to do when I got a lot of work to do is fuss with these, these emails from clients. Why did this system break? I get that this is hard for you client, but just give me the stuff that I need to do my job so I can get this project out the door. When we spend 100% of our time doing the work, like in the meat and potatoes of getting the worked product finished, it means what gets the attention is workflow. What gets the attention is the machine that gets work out the door. Because that's what I spend my time on. And inevitably what becomes the afterthought is the client experience, the thing that actually dictates their willingness to pay me, how they perceive the work that I do for them. And it is really, really hard to wear both hats, particularly when the tech we have is usually optimized to solve for one side or the other. How do we make those trade offs? Because the work still got to get out the door, right? We're going to talk about that today. Also, I'll share some feelings of inadequacy I had this week. The compliance headache of serving people all around the world within a specific niche. Some background on how I make app recommendations, and what is my favorite AI writing solution to use right now. We're covering it all today. It's Q and A Friday. Let's do it. Okay. In my evolution from being a intern in this industry to chief I alpha firm owner, the big dog, I went from, you know, a hundred percent of your time being stuck into doing the work. Your job was just to ship that stuff as efficiently as you possibly can while getting as few review notes back as possible. And that was my entire universe. That was all I cared about. I was a junior. So like, I would have ideas, I would say, hey, maybe we should do this, this workflow thing over here, over there, this is something that could be improved and the powers that be would be like, that's not your job. Play. Yeah, ya ding dong, go. Just pump out more tax returns, get another month, then close, finished. And the reality is, even if you are not like a staff level person, when you're under the gun, like when you're up against capacity constraints, this is kind of almost the only thing that you care about. We may not even like admit to that, but there are times when it's like, buddy, I got too much to lose by not getting this out the door, that anything else just feels like, like child's play, like all that matters is getting this stuff out the door. But but as I evolved into getting myself out of the client work and ultimately was totally out of client work in a 40 person practice where my job was, it was talent acquisition, it was larger strategy of the firm, once I got there, my attention swung totally the other way. It swung to who are the clients that are on our roster? Because that's actually what's going to dictate the success of the firm. Not how to better be in the weeds of how we get the work done, but who are we doing the work for in the first place. Like made the analogy before of, you know, a sports roster. You got people on a sports team whose job it is to make those the people who are on your roster better. And then you've got people on the team whose job it is to bring in better talent. And I would argue in most small firms, we are, we lean more towards being the fixers. We can make this relationship work. Then who's like a person that's twice as talented, who's just the better all around client? Who, whose needs better align with what we do well, right. So as I got removed from that work, the doing of the work day to day, way more of my focus went into what does the client deal with every single day as they're interacting with us. Like our interface for going through our day to day is the workflow tools that we use, right? How we get the work done, the client's interface, how they spend a hundred percent of their time working with us, what does that look like? Because if we were in their shoes, if we were spending a hundred percent of our time on the other side, I'd hazard to guess that that side would get some more love than it does. And we can forget sometimes how actually that client side, that client experience is actually a huge driver of workflow. So very, very easy example, let's say we're going to do a discovery meeting with a potential client. We can all agree that if we have a standardized way of saying, okay, you need to get me X, Y and Z before we can do this discovery meeting. So, so that when I turn up to go through this file, I've got, you know, the prior tax and I've got access to the accounting file, all the stuff that you need to do that work that doesn't require human touch gathering that stuff, I want something to go out to the client to say, you need to get me X, Y, Z. And you're going to be reminded of that until you get me those things so that I can do my work. That's not an opportunity to probably deliver a premium service that is just get me this stuff. Cause I need that stuff to do my job. And the interface we use for them to provide that information like that is part of the user experience. It should be elegant, it should be professional, should be secure, it should be all of those things. But it needs to be good enough for them to be able to do it successfully without getting frustrated. Right? And then it's easier for me to do my job. Now, a really unfortunate thing with the state of software today, and I'm, I'm coming at this as a US person, this. Some aspects of what we do here are unique, particularly around tax. But I suspect a degree of this applies everywhere. In a perfect world, our workflow tools, the tools that we do to actually get the work done, would do everything, would handle the entirety of that workflow process, from the way that work comes in to all the stuff that has to happen in the middle, to the way the work goes out the door. But the reality is when it comes to accounting, there's a ledger tool there. We're pumping it all into a ledger. And in most cases we're not also using the ledger to request information. We're often not using that ledger to deliver the final result. Same goes for tax. You've got software that goes into preparing the tax return, but in most cases the tool that actually prepares the return, it's not the same tool that gathers the information well. It's not the same tool that delivers the tax return. Oftentimes those are a bunch of different tools. And so we've got this super fragmented process. And I would actually argue today AI has made this problem worse because we have new companies that are really good with AI that can handle a certain part of our workflow in a more automated way than ever before. But they're not the incumbent providers. And so now we have yet another fragmentation of our process. We see this, we're like, that's really exciting. That will save me a ton of time. But we've added one more siloed tool because in most cases the incumbent provider either won't do this at all or won't do as good of a job at it as an AI first company. And so we've made our own workflow even more fragmented. Nevermind the fact that that makes the client experience even worse. So how do I pull all of that together into a unified client experience? And how much effort is worth putting into that? A lot of tools that I get excited about are tools that are like 100% geared around and a super, super premium client experience. And this happens now with my content. And I'll let you in on a secret. It was the exact same way back when I was running my firm when I was focused more on the client experience. I had to kind of wear that hat in my firm because the rest of the folks, by and large were so focused on the workflow, on getting the work done. I would come in with an app that's like, oh my gosh, this is going to make our clients lives so much easier. And the reaction from my team would be like, I would really rather not fuss with that because it doesn't impact how I get my work done. But I'm like, what? What do you mean? This will make it so much easier for the clients and if we nail it, it'll make it easier to gather the information that we actually need without putting like a bunch of dumb pointless questions in front of them with boilerplate questionnaires and, and really ugly interfaces. And so I get excited about this way to sort of streamline the client experience. But the team was like, buddy, I, I got a lot of work to get done, I guess maybe as long as it doesn't take me any more time. And the unfortunate reality is right now, standing up a super premium client experience, it does take more time. It is effort to stand that up and make it feel personalized to the user, to your client. If I have a phone call with a client, if a client texts me that detail, how does that bit of information inform the process that they are then sent through? It virtually never does because by and large what's being put in front of them is boilerplate. And the client experiences that are built into our workflow apps are super rudimentary. They don't enable this level of flexibility. So what is the solution? And you're like back to the age old problem of oh well, the solution for all these fragmented things not being enough is, is one more piece of software, right? Like we just plug another one in and that can be a trap. But right now we're in this really sticky spot, like as a profession where you can invest completely in workflow tools, but if that's all you ever do, I would argue the client experience, it kind of sucks. And this is because, you know, request systems and practice management systems are still frankly really bad, like very rudimentary, very basic for most systems. Three years ago they didn't even exist. But then we also have like an entire category of tools that is just all it does is the client Experience. And unfortunately, usually it's not going to play really nice with all of your workflow tools. Like, things aren't going to flow automatically from A to B, but. But the client experience, it's much better. It's much smoother. And if you are, you know, if you're a small firm or if the vast majority of your time goes into doing the work, it is virtually impossible to wear both hats. It just is. Your mind is consumed with the stuff that you've got to get out the door. And when I removed myself from client work, there were people within the firm who would be like, well, man, you're out of. You're out of touch now. Like, you don't do the stuff that we do. You don't know what it's actually like. Never mind the fact that I'd just done it for 15 years. As soon as I stopped doing the client work, I was. I was out of touch. Same thing, frankly, applies now when I produce content. You don't run a firm anymore. You're out of touch. I think all of us, whether it's the people doing the work, whether it's the client, whether it's you, the manager, we are all out of touch in different ways, I guess. And that diversity of perspective can be really limiting if it skews too far in any of those directions. So is the person that's removed from client work out of touch? Yeah, in some ways they are. But you know what it helps do? That role helps make really important strategic decisions to protect the business, where it may be much, much harder to do. If you're the one with the relationship, right, where you have the. The emotional connections that make that really hard or an unthinkable thing to do, you can't make emotional decisions that will drive the business into oblivion. But if someone else has some separation there, it's a little bit easier. If you don't have the bandwidth or the space to be removed from work and have some perspective and get an understanding of what clients think about the client experience, you're not gonna be able to do it well. Cause you just don't have the bandwidth for it or the attention to help your clients feel heard and iterate on the process. Now, I think an important thing that's easy to miss here is the massive punch in the gut. That is the fact that, that we pride ourselves in our technical work and how we get the work done. But unfortunately, when it comes to running an accounting firm, how the technical work gets done, by and large, is not what makes a firm successful. And that sucks. And it frankly can tick you off. There's going to be a lot of you that just like totally grind your gears. It grinds mine because I'm still like, at my core, I think, a pretty vanilla accountant who's just about like, do the work, do it the right way, do the right thing by people. But the super unfortunate reality is what drives the success of an accounting firm is how you package what you do, how you frame your tax planning. Is it tax advisory where like you've found a type of client for whom you can save a pile of money so you can, you can charge in a really premium way for that, or are you still just kind of serving whoever gets referred to you or kind of whoever you've inherited? Are you leaning into investing in the perception of your expertise, whether it's real or not? Perhaps. Because unfortunately, when people don't understand what you do, they buy on the factors that they do understand, which is the client experience. Does the person that they look up to think that you are smart? People don't buy what's in the bottle. They buy what it looks like. They buy what they understand about it. Nobody's buying AG1 because they had before and after medical labs done and can see that it makes them more healthy. They buy it because Tim Ferriss, Andrew Huberman they say it's a good thing. It's like this supplement insurance policy. And when people don't understand what we do and when they don't have a way to benchmark one month end close against another, or one tax turn against another, cause you really don't. Even if they took the same tax turn to somebody else and got a different result, is that because the other person was cheating or they did it wrong? Like the layperson literally has no way to benchmark those things. And as long as they don't understand that, then they're not buying what's in the bottle. They're buying what it looks like. They're buying what it's positioned next to and the perception of it. And that sucks. Like, if you just wanted to be the pie maker, if you just wanted to make the sausage, that's a bummer. But what it means, and this is the argument I use when I was removed from client work, what it means is we have to invest in perception, even though it is total waste. And I would love to virtue signal until the end of time and tell my clients we don't do any of that because it doesn't actually impact, you know, your bottom line, the quality of your work. But unfortunately for your clients, perception is reality. And I can see that in, in some of the, the tech that we talk about, some of the concepts, you'll show the same bit of tech to do two different small accounting firm owners. And one person will say, this changed my life. The other person will say, this is pointless. My practice management system should do this or my tax software should do this. Unfortunately, it doesn't. So until we get there, what do we do? Oftentimes I think it boils down to this, this folk this extreme focus on workflow versus client experience. And I mean, there is no right or wrong answer here. It is just a really hard thing to balance. And if you're, you are building out a firm that is going to have a diversity of perspectives, it ought to be somebody's job to be thinking about each of these sides and coming together to figure out that balance if there's a risk. You know me, just hearing from me, it's, it's probably that the last thing I was doing was not client work. I had the more like the leadership perspective, like that end of the spectrum. So if I'm out of touch, it's, it's on that end of the spectrum now. I want to get more work done just as much as the next guy because that's how you get paid. But it's worth giving some serious thought to in your firm how you balance those things. We've been talking a bit about relationship managers or client success managers and Chad Davis shared how they do that in their firm. Super, super smart. We talked about that a couple of weeks ago. I've heard from a number of you since then that are like, I loved that. I'm totally implementing it. That is one potential benefit of like a relationship manager or a client success manager. Somebody's wearing the hat of advocating for the client and thinking through what that client experience looks like. Because if all we do is do the work, you're almost inevitably blind to that. This episode is sponsored in part by Team Up. I have a story to tell you. It is the story of Laura. Laura was working with a BPO in India. Basically a group that hires all the staffing and the training and all that of the people. And you're, you're more buying like the work product than you are working directly with the people. The problem was they were missing important deadlines and annoyingly, they weren't able to take the work from beginning to end. They just weren't getting it done the way that they needed it. In frustration, they decided they needed to cut bait, find a new solution. And they heard about direct hiring in the Philippines. They were looking for client facing staff with very strong English skills. And Philippines seemed to be the perfect fit. Quote, we really needed to break that language barrier. And with the Philippines being more English speaking, that just seemed to be a better fit for some of those client facing roles that we wanted to fill. The firm started small, hiring just three teammates in the Philippines, and in a matter of months had hired 10 people across a range of roles including bookkeeping, tax accountant, fiduciary, tax preparer, business tax accountant, admin assistant. Laura said the candidates were actually more qualified than we were expecting. The process of interviewing and talking with the candidates is, is really no different than trying to hire onshore. Nothing to be afraid of or nervous about. I can tell you when I built my offshore team, as I did, I built an offshore team in the Philippines for my accounting firm. The person who will edit this video literally is in the Philippines. Say hi Derek. Hi Derek. It's the same thing that led me to the Philippines. Really good English speaking culture. But I too prefer direct hiring because I want to be in charge of the development of the feedback. I want them to be just like everybody else on my team. If I'm hiring like a service to do month end closes or something, I just, I don't have that same level of control. What Laura did here, actually the same thing I did. If you're interested in exploring that, well, team up. Team up can find you some super talented peeps in the Philippines. Learn more Check out the link in the Show Notes. This episode is sponsored in part by Live Flow. Hey, so I was recently at Zero Con in Nashville and you know who else was there? Live Flow. Because they recently launched a zero integration. It's a big deal. It means whatever your favorite spreadsheet app is. Excel, Google Sheets. Wow, edgy. Whatever your favorite spreadsheet app, you can use Live Flow to pull zero reports into your spreadsheets. Pull them in one time, pull it like auto sync it on an ongoing basis. You got a little button now in your spreadsheet app that'll bridge any data from any old client, QuickBooks or Xero file into your spreadsheet app of choice. Bunch of ways you can use this. From giving like fractional access to accounting data to stakeholders like members of the team, the marketing lead, an investor, maybe even the business owner. Because you don't want them in the accounting file. Give them access to the spreadsheet instead of the accounting file. Could save you some Headache also have a growing number of firms that use LifeFlow for month end closes. Like they have this big old workbook template. They pull in a whole ton of reports from the accounting system with the click of one button. And then you got the giant workbook where you can manage the close. It's got all the actual ledger data but in like a spreadsheet file rather than running umpteen PDFs or something like that and having to figure out how to organize all that into your file storage system. And they also do consolidations. So you have to like roll up a bunch of that reporting every single month. I had a dental group I worked with, it was 26 entities. We'd have to do this consolidation and we would only do it once a quarter because it was so much freaking work. It was like a full day to do all that stuff. With Liflo, we could have mapped that and ran it pretty near instantly. We would had to do some eliminations, but we would have taken an eight hour thing to like maybe an hour tops. And the big news is recently they just shipped that zero integration. So whatever your ledger of choice, life flow is going to work out for you. Check out the link down in the show notes was at 0con in Nashville. Recently met a whole bunch of people snuck into a party for Canadians. To all the folks that I met there, fantastic meeting you. Thank you for coming and introducing yourself. I know there are just as many people who were there who even saw me or came to my talk and did not introduce themselves. Look into my eyes from the podcast feed. Listen into my ears. I know who you are. The next time we're in the same place, please introduce yourself. It is, it's weird, especially like after the talk where you've got like crowd of people like kind of hanging around chatting. Don't be afraid to join in the crowd because just like the comment section, the that crowd, it's pretty cool crowd. Like you'll probably make a friend there. So thanks to the folks that came out and hang, especially if you introduced yourself. My business what I do, man, I sit in a room and I shoot stuff. Eight videos a week. I don't have anybody that helps me shoot things. It is me. Just me avoiding the pitter pattering feet of a three, five and a seven year old and a wife that wants me to figure out why the propane regulator on the grill won't work. So when I get to go to like conferences and stuff like that and hang with y' all and it's so fun, it is so energizing. It puts like real identities and people's and names to like metrics, like numbers. Right? That is the downside of like the content stuff is it's actually pretty isolating but very, very privileged. Privileged problem to have. How about that Brandon hall chat yesterday, huh? If you haven't listened to that yet, yesterday on the podcast feed, he had some hot takes, didn't he? Straight up no to value pricing. He said value pricing can't be learned. I don't think that's the case. It's just hard. Anybody can learn value pricing and get better at it. It's just a skill to develop. But I think I would basically be doing the same thing as he is, like, figure out what the market will pay, Build fixed pricing around that. He said you basically get to the price the market will pay and then just scale. I would say you need teams for both because there's tremendous value in finding a way for the market to pay 5% more. Right? So like, who's investing in the perceived value of what we do? Kind of like what we were just talking about, who's investing in the perceived value of what we do. So that can keep going up and who's investing in bringing it in and getting it done. But boy, super sharp guy. Love Brandon Hall. Brandon hall is one of the top five most important fresh thinkers we've had in this profession in the last decade. He absolutely is. He's talking about growth marketing. Like so many themes, you know, influencer type stuff. So many themes that are central to the way that the world works now. How do we all consume? But who's talking about the fact that like, people learn on social media, people learn on YouTube. Like it or not, that's how we learn these days. So how does that impact pricing models? How you build a firm? Can you build a firm around like an influencer? What about when AI continues to make information free and more accessible? When people are then buying on trust more than ever before? What about when we have half as many accountants, when the world gets smaller? Like, what does it look like to run a firm in kind of this new reality? Brandon's bringing a bunch of fresh new ideas in. Think about the number of new people new, like really like fresh thinkers who have successfully built firms in the last decade? I'd argue there aren't a huge number of them. And I don't agree with a ton of the stuff Brandon says, but I love that he's figuring it out and he's actually doing it and he's like, Being real and transparent. He's like my perception of Brandon has always been like, he is that fire breathing guy that just like wants to grow like heck. And there was a stage in my life where I was that way. And it sounds like even he's as a product of having a family and stuff like that is like changing a bit in that regard. But I love it, man. We need more people sharing their journey like that. It is so, so valuable. Think of the like, I was thinking about this the other day, the resources people have at their exposure now to build new firms if they're aware of what's happening online, to build new firms from scratch. So, so different than what I like what anyone had access to 10 years ago where it's like you want to pay to go into a consulting group, otherwise all you got is like continuing education, right? Maybe. Man, there's so many like awesome resources out there now to help folks. I just want to share a quick note. I saw myself in a video last week and I was looking rough. The lighting was not doing me any favors. I'd had a short night due to kids stuff. The T shirt also, the shirt was not doing me any favors. It was like a, like an exercise shirt. I saw someone else post something about this on Twitter recently where like they saw pictures of themselves giving a talk at a conference and they're like, I realized after seeing those pictures, I need to make some changes. Gang. Welcome to being human. You think any of us are immune from that? You know how expensive these cameras and these lights and how many years we've invested in getting all this stuff just right. And everybody looks up to me like, he's the video guy. He's got it nailed. He travels with hair and makeup. Man. We are all going to have those days. And it is an important feedback loop. Like sometimes you do have to check yourself. Am I like, am I taking care of myself? I've invested more in like health and body stuff this year and it feels really, really good. In fact, I was hiking 2 days ago holding my 3 year old and absolutely ate it. Foot slipped out, was not wearing the right shoes. It was the shoes fault, to be clear. And I did this like figure four splits sort of scissor maneuver and I was going down. And if you've ever gone down like holding a kid, that's a stressful moment because that could end up in like a like body slam type of situation where you're just, it's not going to be great. But I tell you what, I went down and I Stuck it. I absolutely stuck it in this weird little. Weird little splits maneuver. My right hip flexor was being taken to territories heretofore undiscovered, but I stuck it. I stabilized, and I'm like, I'm really glad that the last three or four months, I've spent a bunch of time on flexibility, on mobility. Man, I'm getting old. I'm 36, and it's probably the first time in my life where I feel like a. There was a window of time there where I lost ground. There was a couple of years there where I was like, ooh, I could do more a couple of years ago than I could now. And so now I'm, like, fighting against that for the first time. It feels really good. But sometimes, like, you'll have those moments, you'll see a picture of yourself, and you're like, ooh, who's that guy? Know that I have those two. I don't think there's a person on the planet that doesn't. And there ultimately is nothing more important than taking care of yourself. I've got a. My mom has had some mobility issues lately, and I, like, super got on her case and felt a little bad after about it afterwards because she's kind of of the age where you lose some of that mobility and things just start falling apart. And, man, if you want to, like, be active and do all the things that you want to do, there's no, like, today trade off. That makes waiting to do that the right answer. No, client work is more important than your longevity, than, like, taking care of yourself. Okay, stop lecturing me, Jason. You know that little side hustle group that got spun up from the comments of a. Of a podcast? They've got a little group going in discord, but they're also kicking off a podcast here. I'll share. I don't think they've actually gone live with it yet. If you do run a side hustle firm and you're looking to build your own thing, that podcast will be coming soon. I may actually talk with the guy that's put that together on the podcast next week. That all started by dropping a comment and not lurking and then finding it was like, oh, a bunch of other people are actually in the same position and they're now all helping each other, making friends and all that. That could be you today. What is the thing that you're stuck on? The more visible we are when we talk about those things, the more likely you're going to attract solutions and other people in a similar position. Absolutely. Love it. I wanted to circle back to one aspect of specialization that is a pain in the hiney right now. Derek Foote brought this up. It is, it is that particularly if you run a U.S. tax firm, if I specialize in a niche and then have to serve people from that niche in every corner of the United States and every little tax jurisdiction, that's a freaking nightmare these days, like there's so much awful salt stuff that you have to manage. Derek and I both have run tax firms in Oregon, which is particularly brutal when it comes to local compliance. And the reality is when you pick up your first client in the middle of nowhere, Minnesota, there's going to be some sort of payroll credit or energy efficient livestock production activity deduction that like you just aren't aware of. And so as the regulatory compliance gets more difficult, the specialization in a region gets more compelling. That actually is a form of specialization like being the best within a region now, still going to be a lot of other people in that region. But for example, if you compare this with a bookkeeping business where bookkeeping is largely the same everywhere, right, There is less friction for the bookkeeping business to specialize than there is for a purely tax business to specialize. But in the middle there is a company that's like a firm that's doing more of the vertical, like all of the bookkeeping and all of the tax, there's a little more incentive there for them to specialize. Now while local compliance is a pain and you may run some risks by doing this one off random client in Oklahoma. You don't know anything else about Oklahoma. It still cuts both ways. If I pick up a beekeeper and there's some beekeeping specific compliance things that I'm not aware of, there's still some risk to that too. Very practical examples I've run into in the past. This is my early days in the profession. We picked up a bunch of restaurant clients where the firm didn't know about tip credits and we go back and we mend tax returns, do tip credits. Before cost segregation was really a thing, I guess before people were as aware of it as they were today. We picked up a whole bunch of real estate clients and started specializing in that a bit. Because we're going back and doing the I don't know if there's an accounting method change back then. However you went back to change all that stuff. Domestic production activities deduction. We got any OGs out there? I have street cred, thank you very much. Our firm did a deep dive on that stuff and started picking up all these clients that should have been able to claim this thing that's no longer around. But because they were working with generalist firms that weren't aware of it, they weren't taking it R D credits. A decade ago almost nobody was doing R D credits. I think they got a little juicier. But I will say compliance can cut both ways. If like there are still risks to being a generalist when it comes to compliance, but for sure there is a lot more friction when it comes to serving compliance anywhere and everywhere. And this is my opinion, there's lots of people to disagree with it. My opinion is still that the most profit optimized firm is one that is specialized because I believe you can solve more specific pains and you can make the operations more turnkey when you're serving similar clients. While I believe that is the more profit optimized firm. There are many ways that we can optimize our firms that may take us down a path we don't wanna go or is like counter to kind of an anti goal that you may have. This episode is sponsored in part by Cloud Accountant Staffing. Hey, you run a tax firm, you struggle to find good tax talent. Yes, yes you do. Let me tell you, the world's getting smaller every day and cloud accountant staffing will help you find mega talented accountants in the Philippines who already have tax. Actually, hang on, how's this sound? 2 years tax experience using Intuit Pro Connect or Uproconnect User sounds good, right? Before that they did audit. Bless their hearts for getting out of there. Experience with RC reports, Core v Tax Planning and last actually oversaw a team of other preparers. It's the type of resume you would see where if you saw it from like a stateside person, you'd be like. Like the cut of this person's jib. Man, you be on it like moss on a Mississippi tree stump. But just because that resume isn't from someone in the States doesn't mean they can't contribute. Now are there other hurdles that come with hiring people? Offshore disclosures, stuff like that? Maybe. If you haven't run a distributed team before, you're thinking how do I manage people that aren't like right under my thumb or in my office for sure. Things to learn. But you know who's gonna be really good at helping you with that? A company who's done it with a bunch of other firms. So stop trying to reinvent the wheel and figure it all out yourself. Hop on a call with Cloud Accountant Staffing, tell them what you're looking for. They're gonna cut loose their recruitment to find talented applicants. And you'll only make a hire if you find somebody you love. Doesn't hurt to start the process just to learn. If for nothing else, check out Cloud account staffing. There's a link down in the show notes. The most important software decision. Oh that you'll ever make in your accounting firm. It is your practice management system. Oh. This episode sponsored in part by Client Hub. Good way to think about it. The four Cs cut carrot, no capabilities, client experience, clarity and community. I've already told you about the first three Cs. Today we're talking about community. Client Hub is particularly suited here because they got a co founder that was a former firm owner and pro top 100 pro advisor. Not just a pro advisor top 100 that knows how accounting firms actually work. Imagine that software people that actually know how this stuff works. When you adopt Client Hub, you don't just get a practice management system, you get a community that is aligned around their simple vision. Happy clients, Happy firm. That's nice. As part of Client Hub, you can ask questions, get advice, share your perspective, all with a welcoming community of small firm accounting professionals. So at software but Client Hub, they're actually going to deliver a service to you that is sharing the value of what all the other firms that are using Client Hub are figuring out. Just the other day we were talking about how we have this divide between workflow tools and the client experience. If any practice management system was built from the ground up around the client experience, arguably it's Client Hub. It's basically like a two sided task management system where the client logs in just like you do and you've got like a shared space to knock out those tasks. That is Client Hub. To learn more, check out a link down the show notes. So there's also a bigger question of, you know, we talked especially early in the podcast, we talked about this more. Maybe we need to get back to it. This notion of enough and the. The hamster wheel and the moving target. That is There was a day when you would have just been shouting from the mountaintops if you could just go back and made what your W2 was the wages you made with your last employer. You'd be like, you'd be like, I would trade anything to do that. Now you're 2x that. Now you're 3x that. Now you're 10x that is your life. Better. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Okay. Too direct. Better question. Why did your target move so much Remember when you were happy with that? You were rolling the Camry, mowing your own lawn. Remember those days? There's an element of reaching, like enough. Where you may see a more optimized version. But the better question isn't, will that better optimize my firm? Rather, it's am I going to enjoy that? Is that something I actually want to do? Would I enjoy only talking to dentists all day, every day? That's a factor here. And so while virtually every business coach is going to be like specialize and and force you to do those hard things, most of us are so far, if you run a firm, are so far past enough. Like, you are so far past the threshold that has a measurable impact on happiness. Little Timmy's got everything he needs. It is an okay answer to be like, I'm at enough. And that doesn't sound fun, so I'm just not going to do it. Take that business coach. We did that last week. We did that episode around like tax software. And there's a lot of things I didn't mention as a rule. There will always be things that I don't talk about and usually that's for a reason because I can't bring up every single tool. But also, you don't need to hear about all the things you shouldn't use as much as you need to hear about the things you should use. I would argue that I have talked with more accounting firms in North America than maybe anybody else in the last three years. That is if there is. If being Internet think boy makes me out of touch, I would say the big advantage I have is I can spend all of my time talking to different firm owners and get perspective from a bunch of different firms. And the product of that is like what bubbles up is just learning what has worked and what hasn't worked for people. And I don't dunk on people in my content. I think there is enough to be made of highlighting the good stuff that's happening and the right direction to go with where if you just shout that from the mountaintops and you drown out everything else, the bad stuff just goes away because it doesn't get any attention. So I don't give attention to bad stuff. So usually if I'm not mentioning something, sometimes it's a brand new thing that I'm not aware of. But that's very, very rare. The more likely thing is either I don't think it's the best solution, there's a better alternative, like the people who sponsor my content. These are all Brands that I have handpicked who I would be using in my firm. And that's the only reason we do partnerships with them. But the people I don't talk about, generally it's because there's a better option or because I don't believe in the team, the leadership. Now, I could go out and make an explicit list of things that I don't recommend, but the next question then is, well, why don't you recommend them? And sometimes there's logical reasons, like, I don't recommend Pro Series because Pro Connects getting all the investment, and Lizard is the bigger legacy desktop offering. So why would they invest in Pro Series? But there's going to be other tools where it's like, I don't recommend them because I go to Vegas and their team is starting coke off a prostitute in a limo. And so if I stand up that list of tools, that's like, here's all the ones I don't recommend. And people are like, why? And I tell you the reason that I just gave you. There's like, very real, like, defamation liability in what I do. The. The influence has gotten important enough to where you. Like, I could run somebody through the mud and it would genuinely hurt their business. So when I'm recommending stuff, like, I'm highlighting the stuff that works that I've seen real social proof of, like, at working in people's firms, sometimes it means we're late to the party because I'm usually not going to be the very first person to use a new thing. But I'm not going to highlight the stuff that isn't worth using for that reason. If we just praise and highlight and show off the best stuff that's happening, the rest of it takes care of itself. Last, what is my favorite AI writing solution right now? It's funny. I'm a. As you know, I'm a total AI geek. But as far as engagement goes, I think accounts are kind of over AI. Like, AI content doesn't really get all that good of engagement. And oftentimes a lot of the engagement's actually coming from tech people and software people, not actual accountants. Accountants are like, show me how it's going to work in the context of what I already do. I'm interested in that. Otherwise, please, I'm kind of over it. As you should be, frankly. Like, people have been telling you it's going to replace you for enough years. Like, let's get on with replacing ourselves if it's actually going to happen. Not other people replacing me, but. But me replacing myself. I'm happy to do that. But my favorite AI writing solutions, I think like AI around marketing and ideation. Still, it's probably the second most interesting application. AI application for accountants. Right now I use Claude Claude AI and wordware, which I teased a couple weeks ago. Wordware is a tool that basically lets you chain multiple prompts in a row using any language model, whether it's one of Claude's models, whether it's GPT4. Basically, you can build a sequence of prompts to say, do this now, refine it now, do a deep dive on number three now, loop this four times and do a final prompt on this. And with the way language models work right now, oftentimes running multiple prompts in sequence gets you a much better result than just running a single prompt, because you can have it think about it from different perspectives and just build out a more comprehensive workflow than just like a single prompt. That's really useful when it comes to building reusable things. So, for example, let's say you have a meeting transcript and you want to generate questions, hypothetical questions from that meeting transcript that you could use and answer in social media content. Well, you could run it through a series of prompts that maybe redact the transcript and then generate the questions and then approve upon the questions. And then you indicate your favorite question and it goes. And it makes three hypothetical podcast outlines out of it, and you identify the couple sections that you like the best from those outlines and it creates a couple more hypothetical ones based on your favorite parts. So wordware is like more of a sequential way to do AI workflows and is actually representative of what the future of AI doing work on our computers actually looks like. Where it's like, okay, I tell it to open QuickBooks, okay, it's got to open Chrome, it's got to go to qbo.in.com it's got to log in here and then get to the QBOA screen. But all I did was like I give it a set of verbal instructions or semantic, like text instructions to go and do those things. It's not just going to be a single prompt probably that has it go and do a hundred different steps. It's going to be like in paragraph form describing how you like what your process is for matching transactions, just like we do with an SOP today. It's basically like giving an SOP to an AI. So today wordware is like a chat GPT interface that lets you prompt it multiple times in sequence and it will run those automatically in sequence in the future. Where AI has some RPA capabilities. That is it can click on things on your screen, it can type things in with the keyboard. The word way we use that will be similar where you give it a series of instructions just like the SOPs that you give to your team. And then the AI navigates problems, uses the software the same way that a human user does. Now, ultimately, the quality of like the output you get when it comes to AI writing will be a product of the quality of what you put into it. So are you giving it examples? Are you giving it super explicit, clear expectations of how to do it? Just like if I ask an intern to do a task, the more explicit I get the the more likely the output will align with what I want. The same goes for AI workflows, and it's a real skill that is worth developing and helping your team develop as well. Hey, thanks for the questions. Q and A Friday on my favorite day of the week. Keep those questions coming. Pop them in the comments. Disagree with me, fight me. Share your story. Like, what is your experience? Because I only have my own. And the unfair thing that I get is to learn from all of y' all what's worked, what hasn't worked. And then I steal a bunch of those ideas and put them out into the world. That's it for this week. Thanks for coming and hanging and I'll see you in the next one.