312 MEETING TECH for Professional Services in 2024

A lot of cool new tech around meetings these days and we can plug all these things into our meetings. But unless we have an actual plan for what do I do with this new data that I have or when do we use this tool or that tool, unless you got a plan for that, you kind of just like creating tech overhead without actually driving, I don't know, a positive change, better results. So today we're running through the coolest new meeting tech out there and the functionality those things enable. But then thinking through how do we plug this into what the meeting requirements are for my firm, what the expectation is for any given type of meeting. And it's okay if these requirements don't exist yet. This will be a chance to start thinking about how you could create that. But then how we use that tech to enable those requirements make those meetings more useful than ever. Come on in and meet with me. Two main types of tech I'm thinking about when I think meeting tech. One, honestly, booking tools like started as calendly but now there's a whole ton of them. But the life cycle of what they enable from before meeting to after a meeting unlocks some really cool potential possibilities. But then the other big one, as you may have suspected, AI meeting assistance. So specifically, what are the features of these two tools that I think can enable meetings to be more useful than ever before? When it comes to booking tools, you can basically build like drip, email or text campaigns into these bookings in the lead up to the meeting. So what do you want that person to see a day before the meeting? Two days, three days, four days, five days. And it's going to be very contextual to what, what type of meeting it is. And that like the, the, the through line for this whole episode you will notice is making more like classifications around types of meetings. You might just have a scheduling page right now that's just a 30 minute meeting with you or a 16 minute meeting with you. And because this tech enables more workflow specific opportunities, it's worth getting more specific about using for example a new client onboarding scheduling link or a discovery call scheduling link. Not only because you can set up different availability for those different types of meetings, but because you can build workflows around them that make sense just for that type of meeting. So for example, you probably have a list of things that you want to gather from a client before you do discovery. Maybe that's copies of prior tax turns, access to the QuickBooks file, that sort of thing. We can all agree there needs to be some, some sort of probably automated process to follow up with that lead until they provide that information and then you meet and talk about it. Booking links actually do this really well. So if you have a, an event type that is like, you know, discovery call in the lead up to that event, it can be sending reminders to provide xyz. Here's where he put it. In addition to just simply reminding them that the meeting is happening. But even before that, scheduling tools will let you do things like pooled scheduling. Like if you have multiple people that they could meet with, it'll pool the availability and pair you with whoever's available. It will even route those calls according to like inputs that they make into a form. So as they are booking the call, they may have to make a couple selections. And according to those selections, that call actually gets booked with the best person according to those selections. Some of the tools now do group voting as well. So if you are trying to get a bunch of people together and that's just a nightmare, having to coordinate schedules, some of them now support like everyone on a call being able to vote for times to meet and then auto sending out a calendar invite once everyone has voted on those times. If there's one that everyone has available that's super handy. That's one that I use like once a week now. But I think what I like most about booking tools, besides just saving the headache of having to bounce times back and forth, is the workflows that you can build before a call, but also the workflows that you can build after a call. And so if, if you get more contextual about what these meetings are, in most cases, there's certain things that you always want to happen before the meeting and certain things that you always want to happen after the meeting. And there's a number of different ways you could manage these workflows. Maybe it's something that ought to live in your practice management system instead. But if you don't have that, if there's not a great way to do that, maybe they're not an actual client yet and they only go in the PM when they are a client, then the workflow capabilities of booking tools can be super helpful. Here to take care of those before and after meeting tasks. Now, AI meeting assistance, meeting recorders, whatever you want to call them, they have a growing list of features that are super powerful. They've actually come a long, long ways in the last couple of years. If you're stuck on security for these, like don't take security advice from a YouTuber, like go through this with your IT group. But the mainstream tools that we talk about, like, they have HIPAA support, they are SOC2 type 2. They are as secure, if not more secure, than most of the other apps that we use. The main players here, Zoom, has a version of these features that's really, really weak right now. Microsoft Teams does some of this. The main players are Fireflies, Fireflies AI and Fathom Fathom Video. So what do you get with these? What's the point of them? Big thing is transcription. I'm a huge advocate of using AI meeting recorders because if you had a transcript of every client meeting you've ever had for the last decade, that would be so, so helpful. So start today. Like, don't take another meeting that is not captured. If you do in person meetings, these tools also have mobile apps where you can record that stuff. I did a, I did a talk in London last year and one of the big things that I pushed everyone go out and do is go out and start playing with AI meeting recorders. Somebody came up to me afterwards and said, like, I just, I guess, I guess it's not for me because I meet with most of my clients in person. As if the technology to capture in person meeting sounds and noises and words hasn't existed for a really long time. Right. It's actually gotten even easier now because I think both Fireflies and Fathom, I know Fireflies does have mobile apps that will do in person recording. So it's simply having the app recording on your phone to capture that conversation. And just think of the value of having all of that, of getting out of a meeting, having to head straight into another meeting, but your team having access to that transcript right away, getting in taxis and doing the back to backers. And you can like be the blocker on all the stuff you got to hand off using those calls for training purposes. Super powerful. If. If you're stuck on the notion of someone listening to those conversations, if you think your clients will be concerned, honestly, it's getting more normalized by the day, which is great. But all it requires with your clients is a single conversation that is just. We capture all of our meetings in this firm. That is just the policy. If that makes you uncomfortable, think about why that is. Like, I don't want to have a conversation with you if you need to have it on my burner phone, but it'll save you a load of time client, because my whole team can be up to speed on our conversation. We can talk about something and I can go back and have perfect memory three years ago. So I don't have to ask you what was the deal with this, that or the other thing. I can ask you if it's changed. But anything you tell me we've now captured, which is just going to make everybody's lives easier. And if you want, I can even get you access to those transcripts yourself. 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 account 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 Proconnect 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'd be on it like moss on a Mississippi tree stump. And 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 going to 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 going to cut loose their recruiterments 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. 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 and 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 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 this 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 have 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. Now other features for these tools because they do more than just transcription now they do like LLM sort of AI search of the transcripts. So historically transcript tools like Otter has been around for a while, right? And it'll give you just a text transcript of a meeting or a voice recording. But still to find something in a meeting like that, if you're doing the control F search, like you have to get the text and the, the vernacular just right. And when your transcript isn't a hundred percent accurate, that actually makes it even worse because you could have said a word that was maybe the name of a street or something that isn't a regular word. And you're probably not going to type out the text the exact way that the transcription got it. The Beauty of AI search and using LLMs where you can ask it did this thing come up is it doesn't require you to like perfectly spell that thing. So I can go back and say something more abstract like did Jim talk at all about his rental properties? Or I can search across all the transcripts I've ever had with this client to say have we ever discussed the 123 Main street rental? To be able to do that and instantly get that response, man is gold. If there's a bummer here, it's that our practice management systems don't yet support deep file search. That is if I have files, if I have documents, if I have transcripts set up as files in a practice management system and I'm searching in my pm, it's not searching as far as the contents. And I think every case right now is just searching the file names. So the transcript tools, like if I log into Fireflies, log into Fathom and search there, it will do that really good. Search through all the transcripts. It's one of those things I've really been harping on for practice management systems. Better AI enabled search. Because if I could get all my transcripts into my client files, that would be really useful, right? Then I'm searching across not only transcripts but also emails. Imagine that for a single client across all their entities to be able to search and be like, did any. Did we ever talk about this? Not only you, but any of your colleagues in your firm as well. Has this ever come up? And it being able to see across all that stuff, man, that would be killer. We are so close to that right now. It's just happening in two places. You search in your PM to see into emails and that sort of thing. Then you have to search into your AI meeting transcript tool as well to see if it's, if it's come up in any of those conversations. Other handy things about these tools, transcripts can be shared. You can even set the tool to automatically email out copies to any attendees if you wanted to. You don't have to, but you can if you want to. May not be the worst idea to put copies of them in like your file system where the client can log into their portal and see those transcripts. Speaker identification. This was a hard thing. Early days. They've gotten better. The ability for it to know who said exactly what, which is very important. Being able to upload files for transcription. So let's say you have a voice memo or you just got it in some weird format because something went sideways or you Just it wasn't a normal zoom meeting or something like that. Fireflies, I don't know. I don't think Fathom does, but Firefly supports uploading any old file and taking the transcript of that. I mean, you could even use that for like, say you do a podcast or something like that. I mentioned the mobile app for in person conversations, sentiment detection, so you can set up like alerts if there was maybe a problematic conversation. And if you're on a larger team, that could be something worth having. You can create snippets from those meetings. You can even like tell the I go and grab snippets that meet these criteria. Boy. Oh. One of the things, if I can, if you'll indulge me on a tangent here, one of the things I love about like the Jason bot that we've made, kind of the AI assistant that sits on top of all of these podcast episodes where I can talk with it and it will give advice according to things that I said on the podcast. One of the things that I love about that for accounting firms is the notion of having a similar bot that is trained on your advising that you actually do with clients that a marketing partner can use for creating content. And there's an important step there where it's like, okay, then how do we redact our actual client meetings before it goes into that assistant? And there's ways to do it. Right now it's just kind of manual. And I'm hoping somebody builds this into a product at some point. The, like, redaction of all the identifying things. Because if you think about these advisory meetings, like, these are the sawdust of professional services firms. You take these calls every single day, giving people advice. What if that could be your content? Or what if that could at least be the seeds of a AI assistant that you then use to generate content? It's virtually impossible to get a marketing agency to produce things in your voice, but when they have your voice, wow, that's really exciting. Right now, right now, these tools will let you use AI to identify, based on certain criteria, snippets across transcripts and pull those snippets out. Imagine if you were like, I've got a blog post going on this topic. You go to your AI meeting assistant and you say, pull snippets of all the references I've made to this. And it could be across 15 different client conversations in the last three years. Imagine how useful that would be to you, to your team, maybe even to a junior who's like, I haven't navigated this conversation with a client before. Do we have any examples of this? Or to like your external marketing partner? How great is that, man? That is why we need to really be thinking about what we're capturing today. Because making use of what we've captured in that context, the tools we have to make use of that are more powerful than they've ever been before and will continue to get better integrations. These platforms integrate with other tools. Not a ton of native integrations with PMs, like in the accounting space right now, but like with your Hubspots and kind of your more mainstream CRMs, you've got integrations, you got stuff like, like Zapier and make where you could build your own integration if you wanted. And then most of these will support multiple platforms. So like Fireflies and Fathom, you can plug them into your Zoom, you can plug them into your Microsoft Teams, plug them into your Google Meet wherever you do meetings. Which is kind of the goal here, right, Is to get all of those conversations rolled up into a single place. That is an upside of Fireflies and Fathom is you can connect it with any meeting platform now, ultimately making that actionable. Is it worth capturing that stuff? Like, yes, it is, because it will be nice to have down the road no matter what. But in a perfect world, you've got like a set of requirements for what the life cycle of any meeting in your firm ought to look like. And this is to avoid meetings just happening that don't need to happen. Meetings happening where it's not clear coming into it what the purpose of it is, so people aren't really prepared. I think the most cited example of like organizational meeting rules is probably Amazon. You've probably heard this before. Amazon's got kind of these four rules. One, the two pizza rule. A meeting should never be larger than a group you could feed with two pizzas to the whole empty chair thing. They always leave an empty chair in the meeting to represent like the voice of the customer who's not there. Three, no PowerPoints, they say, because there's just a lack of depth to slides and the visual nature of them can be a distraction. Instead, you have to write a memo for that meeting. I think it's up to six pages. But then number four, every meeting starts with 20 minutes of silence, so everyone can read that memo. Because we've all had the problem of turning up to a meeting and half the people are prepared, half of the people are not prepared. So they literally carve out the time in that meeting for everyone to consume and Digest the memo itself so that when you head into the discussion, everybody kind of has the same context. Now these are obviously internal meetings. They are not meetings. The same kind of meetings we're probably thinking of, which are client facing external meetings, but we do also have internal meetings. Right. And this is where like the classification of what types of meetings we're talking about ought to have their own sets of rules. And for me, this would probably like in practice they would probably start with my scheduling tool. It is having scheduling links that are specific to the type of meeting. Maybe for external calls with clients, there is a scheduling link for advisory meetings, for client questions where they need to get on a call, those related to specific projects, meetings with leads, you know, client questions is a great example of. I don't ever want to head into a client question conversation without them setting some sort of agenda or giving me some context as to why we're going to talk. Because if there's something I need to like round up to prepare for that meeting, I want to know about it ahead of time. So on that booking link for like a client question, if they're able to book a call with me for that, a requirement of them when they do that booking. So they need to give me some sort of context about why we are meeting. Today's episode is sponsored in part by Team Up. How do you hire people that aren't mediocre? How do you avoid just attracting like the middle of that normal distribution? Right. We want exceptional people. Well, the answer is recruiting is framing your firm and your role as here's what we do. Like we have something to say, we're opinionated on the right way to do this stuff and being specific enough to attract an exceptional person who that specific role resonates with. And it is easier said than done and not unlike how we can attract very general clients. If we don't get specific about this and we don't do the work of recruiting, you can end up with generic results. Not to be mean about this or inhuman, but without putting in the effort, it's just going to be less likely that you find those exceptional people. Right. Just how many people should you be going through? According to Team up, you gotta be looking at inviting between 2 and 300 people to apply, getting between 50 and 75 completed applications, getting between 10 and 20 people to complete kind of an introductory test like establishing a technical bar. Do five to ten interviews and end up with two to three fantastic candidates. Sound like a lot of work? It is. And that's why partnering with somebody to help you with this will actually increase the likelihood that you get really high quality hires. So team up. They'll help you find really talented accountants in the Philippines. Not just like pulling in whoever's walking by, but like doing outbound. Like they have a team of recruiters that are putting a bunch of legwork into this to increase the likelihood that you actually get really, really good people. Learn more about teamup. Check out the 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 clienthub Good way to think about it. The four Cs cut, carrot cut. No capabilities, Client experience, clarity and community. I've already told you about the first three Cs. Today we're talking about community. ClientHub is particularly suited here because they got a co founder that was a former firm owner and pro advisor top 100 pro advisor. Not just a ProAdvisor top 100 that knows how accounting firms actually work. Imagine that software people would 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 it's 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 the link down the show notes. Now for a discovery meeting, Obviously we have a whole set of different set of requirements for what we want to get from them, right? But if we use a different scheduling link for each of these things, the workflow can be specific to the purpose of that meeting. Same thing for internal meetings. If you are an EOS firm, you have all sorts of different types of meetings that are pretty locked down and you've got kind of your templates for how you run those meetings. That stuff plugs into these tools really, really well. If you're not an EOS firm. And if you're not that rigid about your meetings, it is worth thinking about and it doesn't have to go like totally to the extreme. But you know how bad the opposite end of the spectrum can be. Where there is no standardization around how you run meetings, you end up wasting a lot of time. And most of us are not like capturing the result of that meeting. We don't have a transcript, we don't have a clear set of action items. There's not like a follow up email that is sent to the client after the fact. So for me, if I'm like dialing in what this workflow looks like, it is having various different booking links for all of the type of mean types of meetings that I'm willing to take, which there ought to be an explicit list of what those are. Right? Like you won't just take any, any old meeting. At the very least you just have a catch all for like anything that falls out of what you know, 90% of meetings can be bucketed into. So it all starts with a scheduling link. You tailor the reminders leading up to that to gather anything that you need to gather before the meeting occurs. And if you don't get that information before the meeting happens, you cancel the meeting, you reschedule the meeting because you don't have the information that you need. Now during the meeting I'm absolutely using a meeting recorder. Again, I'll have a single conversation with my clients that's like this is why we use this stuff. Maybe I'll even give them a one page explainer or some explainer that comes with a meeting confirmation or something like that. Because I can on calendly, for example, I can customize the meeting confirmation email that they get. And so I could even put that explainer in there to say like hey, just so you know, there's going to be an AI meeting assistant on this call with us. We're going to get in there, we're going to have that assistant there. A couple other things that for some reason I didn't have in my features list that can happen during a call. Some of these tools now have live transcripts during a call, which for multiperson calls are really useful because they can be queried during a call. So if somebody hops on 5 minutes late, 10 minutes late, they can query it to see what has been discussed so far. Another interesting thing is like a real time visualization of who is taking up talk time. And if you have it depends on the type of meeting. But if you have the type of meeting where it's like everybody needs to be speaking in and it's, it's visualizing who's speaking and who isn't in a way that everybody can see. That can be a, a helpful function to encourage folks to engage. Maybe there's a version of that that's bad if you're putting too much pressure on somebody. But even if you turned off the visual of that and you had that data after the fact, that's probably good information to have. It could be helpful for those scenarios where you've got one person that will just like absolutely dominate the meeting. And then after the meeting there's probably like a mandatory set of things that need to happen. So you probably need to explicitly outline what are the action items and who's doing them. Like if I need the client to do something, I am sending them a follow up email to document that fact. Like, great chatting today as discussed. You're going to go round up xyz, I'm going to round up abc. Like what are the next steps? A follow up email, almost. At least for external meetings, a follow up email really ought to be like mandatory to kind of close the loop on that meeting. It's fine if you send it out right after the meeting or if you schedule it for the next day, but some version of that is necessary. It's also an opportunity to add on like additional helpful context and to like draw on a different example of where AI is helpful here. When I do the podcast, I'm super bad about, about remembering to do the show notes because I sit down and I record these for about 40 minutes at a time. And the conversation sometimes will go different directions, maybe not what I have totally outlined here. And I'm like, oh, this is a related thing that would be really helpful for people to have. And I'll say, I'll put it in the show notes, but I may finish that recording 30 minutes later and that, that may be totally gone and out of my head at that point. Right. And one thing that language models do super, super well is I can chuck a transcript of one of these podcasts in there and say either explicitly give me a list of all the points where I said I would include something in the show notes, or even just more generally give me a list of anything that was discussed where it would just be helpful if I provided additional context in the show notes. And then it's not looking for show notes references, it's literally going through the whole transcript and being like, well, you did, you talked About Fireflies here you talked, you mentioned Microsoft Teams once. Like, here's what I'd recommend for like a list of show notes. And so that works really well for, for podcast show notes, but you probably don't have a podcast because unlike me you have a job. So that works really well for podcast. Let me try it again. So that works really well for podcast show notes, but you have a job. So that works really well for podcast show notes, but you're not unemployed like me. Like you have an actual job, so you probably don't have a podcast. If you think about doing the same thing with a meeting transcript, you could totally have like a canned prompt that your team uses where at the end of every meeting and there may even be a way to automate this. In fact there absolutely is at the end of every meeting. And I'm thinking external client meetings here is going to build a list of action items and these AI transcription tools will actually build a list of action items for you automatically. But I want the list of action items and I also want to build like a helpful bullet point list of what was discussed and additional resources even potentially where you can link them out if they wanted to go deeper on any of the things that you discussed. Just like the show notes in a podcast episode, that's something that I can get you like 80% of the way there on. And if you compare that to not even sending a follow up email and the fact that I can can build most of that for you, it's one of those things where the overall value of the meeting after the fact probably just went way up because you shared those resources. Like not unlike, you know, I've talked about how in financial statement delivery we started sending three minute videos anytime we delivered a set of financials and we could put 10 hours into closing, closing a, a company's books and the 10 minutes that went into making that three minute video are like the most valuable thing to the client. Like their, their perceived value of how we delivered that service is just sky high because we put that little video at the end of it. This follow on email is probably another one of those situations where it, it is a, a low lift thing that has a disproportionate impact on the perceived value of what you just did with them. And man, like these AI meeting assistants can get you 80% of the way there. So you're not having to remember what did I talk about 40 minutes ago, right? Or you, you go into five other meetings. You're like, man, I don't even Remember anything that we talked about? Hopefully I sketched it on my legal pad or whatever you use for taking notes. But when we're talking about like external client meetings and that follow up email I think probably ought to be mandatory if you got some wisdom here or increasingly I see more of these meeting assistants in the wild. I'm curious how you're building them into your workflows because I think where we start is we're like, yeah, this is novel, this is a good idea. So I'm just going to plug it in and you start capturing stuff, which is better than nothing because for all the reasons we talked about, like AI can be very context blocked. And if five years from now you wanted to query it about something in this conversation you had, at least it's recorded. Even if you didn't do anything with it when you recorded it, at least you've got it so you can go back and look into it later. There's probably more we can do around specific types of meetings and the workflows that ought to happen in the lead up, the things that get discussed during the meeting and then what happens thereafter. If you feel like you've nailed anything there worth thinking through. If you've never gotten explicit about the type of meetings that you will take, that's probably worth thinking through as well. There's probably, you know, five different types of meetings that make up 95% of the meetings you will take. And actually getting explicit about what those are and what the requirements for each are are valuable just to nail that down from a workflow standpoint, but also to be like, hey, maybe someone else could actually do this fifth type of meeting that I do like. It actually gives you a path towards maybe getting off the hook for some of those meetings and more clearly defining your boundaries for the types of meetings that you won't take. Right. And frankly, like these workflow tools, AI meeting assistants, they make that whole building a process around an abstract thing like a meeting, much easier. Total no brainer for me. Like I'm, I'm super bullish on AI meeting assistants, particularly when you start thinking about the value of capturing the advice that you're giving and like hanging on to those conversations and all the things we could potentially do with that stuff down the road. Pretty cool. But if you got any cool ideas, there would love to see them down in the comments. We'll be interesting to hear what you're using for this as well. And I'll see you in the next one.