335 Your Firm Picked The Wrong NICHE - Now What?

Okay, today, how do you pivot that accounting firm skirt if you did choose the wrong niche? Which if you're headed down that path, it's a possibility. If you're considering niching, it's probably the major blocker, right? What if I don't get it right? Also today, how to protect your calendar for like creating productive time blocks when you're wearing all the hats, getting asked to do all the things. A couple thoughts on pressuring ourselves to over deliver and how to build a custom AI research assistant for your team. It is super easy and and boy is that hot. Hotting up. Come on in. Let's do it. Gather on the radio is Jason Daly. There are days where I roll out of bed and I'm like, how the heck am I going to continue making a daily show about running accounting firms? And then you know what happens? The accountants of the universe deliver. I turn up to my inbox, I got like five or six really smart questions there and I'm like, man, that is like a week of stuff worth talking about. And this is a great question from Tim Krause. Jason, you're convincing me more and more to niche down. However, I have two current issues. This one, I. I razzed him for this in the reply. See if you notice. One, I'm a non technical partner in a firm and my CPA is not super excited to make a bunch of content. So do you think I can do it? Feels a bit weird to two, we have a few niche ideas on the table currently I understand how to start marketing to a niche. I also think I understand the late game, but it's the messy middle that I have some questions about it. The old messy middle. A, if I choose the wrong niche, how hard is it or how much of a setback is it to change it? And B how do you know you've picked the right niche at all? Do you give it six months? A year? Two years? Thanks for all the awesome content. Props to Tim for the mid list pivot from number to letter. I've done that on videos before where I'll be like 1, 2, C, 4 and people never say anything but you turn up after a short night's sleep. Sleeper. You don't have the lights just right and you got a little bag under your eyes. There go the comments. Are you high? No, I'm on video and you're not. Okay, okay. Anyways, to chop these questions down one at a time because there's a lot of folks that I think are in just this spot. So first one I'm a non technical partner in the firm and my CPA is not super excited to make a bunch of content. You probably have some version of this where you're, you're like maybe a little bit removed from the technical work or there's a bunch of different types of technical work happening in your firm and you're like, well, I'm not the tippy top expert on that thing, so I couldn't possibly make useful, useful content. See if this rings a bell, we made this mistake in our firm big time. We had several like start stops around doing an email newsletter and if you're an accounting firm doing an email newsletter and I would argue, I don't know, I come at this from the perspective of I was originally a tax firm, so maybe there's more of a tax form issue. But when you're like, well, who's going to write the newsletter? Write up about new annoying technical thing, you know, Oregon State Transit Tax, like whatever that that new thing is that we're updating our clients on. We're like, well, who's going to write this? Well, who's internally our technical expert, right? Who is the, the alpha brain, the person best positioned to write this thing. And so we tasked them with it and you know what the result is? Boy, the result is something that not even a mother could read. It is so up our own keister on, wow, this extremely technical thing, it's important for this and that reason and the normies on the other side of this that we want to read it are like, okay, okay, just, just tell me how this impacts me. I'm, I'm engaging you to do all this stuff. I'm sure that's interesting, but let's give me the tldr. Do I need to get the checkbook out? Are there any steps I need to take? Can I minimize this tax? Just tell me what to do. And oftentimes the person who is most in the technical weeds, while they should definitely be consulted on that content, they're almost by definition not the right person to do that content. Because if they are the alpha brain, plug them into alpha brain things. This is actually a luxury you have, Tim, that a lot of folks listening to this don't have. They're like, well, I'm the alpha brain because I don't have another option. So when am I going to make time to do content? Doing content and thinking about marketing and getting people into funnels and thinking in terms of frameworks and setting up a squeeze page to like get people to give you Their email address. That is a whole different. Like you could spend your entire career learning how to do that stuff. Well, and copywriting, you know, optimizing all that stuff. That is a whole different can of beans than doing technical work. Totally different skill set. And I would argue if you are simply adjacent to, to the work that's happening and to the people for whom the work is being done for, so that you can see the transformations and the stories and the before and afters and what those everyday questions are. I would say that's actually probably the best place to be, is just adjacent to it, able to pull in those technical people as needed. But if you're getting too far into the weeds, that thing's probably going a million miles over people's head. So being a non technical partner, I think that's totally fine. Arguably even better than being the technical. One second question. We have a few niche ideas. This is kind of a half question niche ideas on the table. Currently. I understand how to market to a niche. I also think I understand the late game, but it's the messy middle. I think here the messy middle is I know how to start. I got all the ideas. I can go reach out to consultants and start a newsletter and all these different things. And then I know what I. What I wish the future would look like right a couple years down the road. Oh, things are. Things are humming. Beekeepers are coming through the doors at record rates and they're super, super profitable. But how do you get from. From A to B? And that's really what the next two questions dig into. You know what? I'm just now realizing this, Tim. I didn't give you enough credit. The A and the B must be nested questions under question two. Gosh darn it, that's how smart I am. Everyone is. I didn't realize these are nested questions. There wasn't any indentation. So, okay, let's say question 2A. What a rollercoaster. If I choose the wrong niche, how hard is it or how much of a setback is it to change? Let me just flip this scriptaroo right on its head because I think this is the best way you can think about it. Assume you're gonna pick the wrong one, because you almost certainly are because you've never done it before. This is like hopping on a bike and expecting to be Tour de Lance. In all likelihood, you will absolutely choose the wrong one. Not only because you haven't done it before and you're not sure kind of the best ways to, to pick one and to get into it, but simply because there's things you don't know yet until you go down that path. Like, you could get six months into this and you're like, oh, I actually despise beekeepers. Or you may stumble into something that's like, oh, there's actually this other adjacent industry that has a way more painful pain that I can solve for and these people have more money and that's just like a better opportunity. I think genuinely the best way to go into it is to assume that you're going to pick the wrong niche. Just assume that. And this is where accounting firms can get super stuck on decision making. We do the same thing with software changes, and there's certain really big software changes that are high stakes enough to where you don't want to get them wrong. But the other end of the spectrum, the indecision, I think it was actually Geraldine Carter that said this in her book down to 40, that indecision is actually deferring your learning journey. The longer you don't do anything, the more you're putting off actually learning. So the goal is, is to learn how to better niche and better specialize a firm, hopefully a product, a byproduct of that. The outcome will be finding a killer niche that's super profitable. And I enjoy working with this people, all that stuff. But for the folks outside of the niche bubble who haven't done it, we're like, I always use the analogy of, you know, a bunch of doors, all these possibilities, and when you walk through that door, and I think this was originally from the Win Without Pitching manifesto. When you walk through that door, and it's scary because you're never gonna see all those other doors again, right? You're never gonna be able to go through those. But then when you walk through that door, you realize, oh, I'm in a whole nother room full of a bunch of doors that I didn't even realize existed until I went through that door. So right now we're looking through that door. We can see that door. We're thinking about it, we're looking through it. But when we get to the other side, we will find, oh, there's actually other niche possibilities that might be even more specialized and even more valuable. And along the way, you've learned a whole bunch about the act of niching of specializing. I would even go as far as to say, like, virtually no niche is a forever niche. Like, if you're like me, you're never going to have fun doing a thing forever until the End of time. And that's where somebody actually shared in the comments when we were talking about value ladders and how most firms are just built around the middle of the value ladder. There's a pretty high ceiling to start work with you. We deliver very little value at the bottom of the ladder, like free or cheap resources for people. And I would argue we under deliver at the top of the ladder as well. And there's a lot of people on our client list who would happily let you do more for them. But we're stuck in the middle of the value ladder. It's not really like an optimized way of running a business traditionally. And somebody shared in the comments they had the same thing I do where they're like, I know I'm probably not going to have fun doing this thing forever. And so what does growth look like for me? How do I get to keep evolving? It's either evolving that growth ladder. And so if you think, if you know, say there's four rungs on that ladder, if you have two people on the very top of that ladder, you don't need to build up any further. But if you have 50 people at the top, top rung of that ladder, there's a good chance there's five or 10 people that would go a rung further. And this was the case in my firm. I had hundreds of people in the most premium thing my firm offered. There were absolutely 50 people in that bunch who would have gone another rung further and that would have been, you know, 2x as profitable as the rung below it. That's kind of the framing that I use. If I'm going to, if it's going to be worthwhile for me to build another rung above that, it's got to be like an order of magnitude, I guess that's 10x. It's got to be a significant multiple more profitable for it to be worthwhile for me to build that next rung. So personal growth for me long term would mean building that growth ladder or growing into a different type of specialization. And you could always sell that practice. You could always have your team sort of take it over. You could always spin a small part of your team out to, to run their own practice. That was that beekeeping business that you're no longer super interested in. There is no niche in all likelihood that is a forever niche. Whether it's a six month thing, a 20 year thing. It's this fixation on trying to roll the dice and get it right the first time and putting all this pressure on the decision and making it super high stakes that actually gets in the way of us growing and getting better and just learning in general. This episode is brought to you in part by liveflow. So been around you probably already know what liveflow does. It connects your accounting ledgers to your favorite spreadsheet app, Excel or Google Sheets, QuickBooks or Xero. But we're on kind of an AI theme lately with this new OpenAI model coming out. You want to know a wild hack that liveflow can enable? How about syncing selected data out of your accounting system that a language model can interact with? So in the AI tests I've been running lately with this new OpenAI model, you can't upload files to it. It's all text. And so I'll like drag and select the text from these big financial reports. Paste it in there. Fine. But what liveflow lets you do is build whatever custom reporting you need to even like reference the cells in one sheet to the cells in another sheet to roll up all this data in totally customizable ways, even across different companies, because they support consolidations as well. But let's say I wanted to augment that with AI Buddy. How about creating all of the context in one view that your AI needs to do some sort of job, Quality assurance, whatever it is. I set up those sheets in Live Flow. One big select copy pasta into my language assistant. It's got all the data it needs to do the review or anything else. And then because with Live Flow, you can template all these reports, you simply change the company that is connected to that spreadsheet. Boom. You've got all the live data for the next company. Obviously loads of useful ways that you can like pull all of your accounting ledger together. And that's kind of the beauty of Live Flows. You can pull whatever you need out of the platform, organize it however you want, and if you're exploring using AI for like quality assurance and technical review, stuff like that, boy, LifeFlow could be your best friend there. That's actually a pretty cool idea. Learn more about Lifelong down in the show. Notes this episode is sponsored in part by Team up, who will help you find talented folks in the Philippines to work for your accounting firm. They have recruiters on the ground in the Philippines. We'll find you awesome people. I'm looking at a bunch of them right here. Rona, that's her name. She's got a bachelor's in information systems. She went to work for a US firm as a virtual assistant. They were paying her 1070amonth. She had four years experience. She's handling people's inboxes, calendars and scheduling their social media. A firm hired her through Team Up. How about Aaron? He's got a BS in accounting as a cpa. Six years income tax US income tax prep experience. So he's doing everything business, personal hustle and ultra tax. US firm hired him, they're paying him 1965 per month. Farah, she's got an MBA and a CPA was last running an entire team of bookkeepers. Six years experience. US firm hired her, their painter. Just over three grand a month to run a team. A team gang. Whether these folks are in the us whether they are abroad, they are capable of running any part of your accounting firm. Particularly as a lot of firms are moving towards like kind of a relationship manager model where you have an onshore person that is managing the client relationship. That's really like the one blocker for some folks is they won't put offshore folks in direct contact with contact with clients though even that is kind of evolving. But our worldview around offshore work is oftentimes misshaped by the fact that menial tasks in other contexts like support will be delegated to India or something like that. The reality is these are super talented people that are capable of learning absolutely anything your onshore team is learning. And you've got big four firms, you got regional firms, you got all sorts of firms employing tens of thousands of people in the Philippines that are absolute experts at their craft. I've shared before, my last four hires were in the Philippines. My firm completely changed the way we approach getting the work done. And that is again how I would build a new firm tomorrow. Learn more about team up. Check out the link down in the show notes. Last part of this, this question to be how do you know you've picked the right niche at all? Do you give it six months, a year, two years? I would say people have different takes on this. I would say the people in that niche you're serving need to ultimately either be easier to serve, easier to staff, easier to attract and or more profitable than your general clients. So if you're gonna niche down, something has to be better. Does it make it easier to find them? Almost certainly. Are they easier to serve? Which means they're not gonna be dependent upon your most constrained brain powers, your most technical people, maybe just you. If I'm looking to delegate advisory or even just like managing the client, that's much, much easier to do. If you have a staff person that's serving a Whole bunch of beekeepers. Rather than expecting that staff person to be an expert in everything. That may be something that you're capable of doing or faking your way through. When we are like taking one off clients of all different types and trying to give them good advice. But it's almost certainly easier once you've specialized. And. Or they have to be, you know, more profitable. Like one of those things or a combination of those things just has to be better. And if it's not better, if you go down a path, if you're like, I want to work with Internet streamers. And somebody shared this a while back when they were considering two niches. It was like farmers or Internet streamers. They started going down the streamer path and they're like, I actually don't like this all that much. And they're actually really hard to support. That's fine. Like, they didn't ultimately end up being better than your best general clients. And so is it right? It's. Are they better clients for the business seasoned with a little bit of. Is this fun for me? Like, do I see this having a future? Cause you could also go to a trade show and learn that, like, these people are all idiots or I have nothing in common with them and maybe it's actually not as fun to work with them as I'd hoped. But even if you go down that path, like, that is a re. Not a. It's not a reason to not try to specialize. If you go down that path, you have way more data. As far as, like, what do I look out for in the next niche that I pick? Right. Super good question from Tim and thanks for checking that in. No doubt. Bunch of people had the exact same question and we just shared some value there. Some folks hopping in the comments on that. The episode we did around better managing your calendar, the 15 second version, I've switched to bunching my time. That's what I'm calling it, bunching. So rather than having meetings sprinkled throughout the entire day, I believe I am a maker, which means a meeting in the afternoon blows up the whole second half of my day. Or a meeting in the morning can blow up my whole meeting because I need big blocks of time to get stuff done. So I'm now booking meetings from the end of the day coming forward. So it can compress my day, but it doesn't break up my day. And you know just how good it feels if you're our maker, when you sit down, you look at the calendar for the day and you're like, oh, I got like six hours and nobody's going to bug me. This is the best. And those are always your most productive days, right? But couple questions to the end of how in the, how in the h do I do this when I'm the one wearing all the hats and I feel like my calendar is just this bucking bronco you don't slot nicely into being either a maker or a manager. Couple of thoughts here, A couple of tips. We don't all have the flexibility of being able to operate 100% of the time in a single mode. And that's, that's the case for me. Like there are times when I have to wear the manager hat and times when I wear the maker hat. But for me, and I suspect for most of you, the bulk of your time should still be maker time. If you are involved in production in the firm, the bulk of your time will still be maker time. So then how do we handle the outlying manager time? The stuff that you know, that you need to do to support the business, to support clients, answer questions, get on calls with clients and all that. Two ways I would approach this. Either block your days out accordingly. First half of the day is maker time. Second half of the day is manager time. I like to do the stuff most important to me at the start of the day because it's when I am at my like peak energy levels and that's when I'm always at my best. And then I let other people have the leftovers and I find that actually usually that's enough or block it by day because pan there is, there is something nice about having a whole day or like six hours to just absolutely crush. There is nothing else like it in this world. That sweet, sweet feeling of a, of a wide open calendar, the wind on your cheeks. Some people see nothing to do. I see endless opportunity. You feel me? This was a great note, not really a question at all. From Laura B. Chapman, cpa. This in the last couple episodes, I believe you touched on the crunch of getting financials done by the 15th. We've split our monthly bookkeeping clients into two groups. Group A financials are due on 15th and Group B are due by the end of the month. We sent a survey. This is the best part. We sent a survey to the clients asking for their preferences of delivery. And to our surprise, half the clients didn't even need or care to have their financials done by the 15th. Now what is your first reaction to that? I can tell you my first reaction to that. Well, that's not my clients. My clients. My mind immediately goes to, well, Laura, your clients obviously aren't as technical or demanding or progressive as mine. Neener, neener. But you know what? I think Laura's right. I think this is a classic case of you're going to have a couple noisy clients that are like, I'm on fire. I need this. The first of the month isn't soon enough. I actually need like the zeroth of the month pretty much as soon as that, that clock ticks over. I need those financials ready to go. And you're going to have a few of those just like you have the clients that cry when you send them a bill. And those people take up way too much of your headspace. You're going to have some of those that are hot to try to get the financials, sometimes for justified reasons, sometimes not for justified reasons. Sometimes it's just that OCD where they want it done. But when we hear that, we will oftentimes wrongly project that over the rest of our clients and say, well, what sort of accounting practice am I running if I can't get everybody their financials by the 5th of the month? And you know that that's, that's unrealistic. So something has to give there. Right? But have we ever stopped to ask, and I think this applies to tax work also. We assume that people want to get their stuff out, you know, before extension time. And oftentimes sometimes you have the OCD people who, they're like, yeah, no, I just, I want to get it done as soon as possible just to have it behind me. And then you have most people who simply don't know that, like this. There's actually perfectly reasonable, like, benefits to waiting, especially if you're a business owner and with a one paragraph explanation, you can say, actually for people like you, it's oftentimes better if you wait. Because we can wait to take tax decisions when we have more information about what your next year's looking like. The way I always framed it was, there are oftentimes benefits to waiting, but. But virtually no benefits to doing it as fast as possible. So why not wait? And your clients don't understand that in the way that you do. But do we ask to take the pressure off? It's as simple as sending a message and being like, hey, this is what I'd recommend. And there will be people like, your mind probably jumps to the people in your client base who will be enraged by that and push back and be like, no, no, no, no, no, I know better than you we need to file right away. But that's probably not the majority. And so to Laura's point, would it kill you to ask? Probably not. We'll probably be surprised by the folks who are totally fine waiting. But we project the few folks we think about who are most urgent. We project that on everybody else. Now, one thing to always look out for here is this is a. It's a bigger problem with existing clients for whom the current reality is all they knew. All they know. Always remember, new clients. They're like 80 bitty babies entering the world. Okay, my kids, I am still. I have a three, five and seven year old. Wait, three, six and a seven year old. And I'm still shocked at what they don't know. They come into this world the most vanilla, blank canvases, basic things. A red box. You're telling me that's a vending machine that will give me little discs that I can watch movies from? Sorry, little Timmy, not at our house. Because we don't actually have a DVD player. The first time you take them to an amusement park, they're like, this exists in the universe that I live in. My middle kid just started going to all day kindergarten. You mean to tell me I'm old enough to get on a bus by myself and go into school? There's just these things that like, oh, you know, this is how it is. But they haven't been like, indoctrinated into what's normal yet. So, like that new client that's coming in, you can tell them. Actually, what our firm does is we just. We file all of our tax returns on September 15th. We. We finish them a lot earlier oftentimes, but we just wait to hit the button until then, just in case. And they'll be like, okay, cool. And the same statement to somebody else that's already on your client list. They'll be like, what do you mean? I've been coming to this place since 1946. And you, you've never done that. Why aren't you like Gerald used to be? So this notion of like asking where, where we usually don't and where we pressure ourselves to over deliver, it could get you off the hook for some of the stuff with your current clients. But don't let that get in the way of you just creating whatever universe you want for new clients coming in. Maybe my favorite example of that new universe. My wife's out of the house right now, so I can share this. She doesn't listen to the podcast. You kidding me? She grew up in the Midwest in The sticks. And I mean the sticks of Minnesota. When she first came out to suburbia, she actually, at one stage in our courtship, she moved into a rental of my mom's and one day was like, all the. She's like, there's something weird going on. Like everybody's just like, rolls their garbage cans out into the street. Like some sort of ceremonial thing. It was the weirdest thing. The other morning. Everybody had garbage cans out. And I grew up. I mean, I grew up suburban. I'm like, I'm struggling to understand what the question is here. She's like, why are they there? And I'm like, the garbage man. What do you mean? She's like, when you say garbage man, I'm like, the garbage truck comes around, it's one of the coolest machines you've ever seen. It grabs that thing, slings it on over, dumps out the garbage, puts can back down. She's like, you just roll it out to the curb. And I'm like, this is like picking up a client from a big four firm or something like that where I'm like, what universe have you been living in? She, when she grew up, they just burned their trash. Her dad digs a hole with the tractor. They burn it and they bury it. And I'm like, look around. There's like sidewalks and stuff. You can't just set things on fire. Anyways, good reminder, everybody's coming into things with different expectations. Let's wrap this up. Okay. This episode is brought to part by Cloud Accountant Staffing. Hey, let's hire some talented people in the Philippines. Because that's what I did in my firm, you know. Why? Well, let's. Let's compare this to the traditional hiring method. Going with a traditional recruiter. Startup fees. 15 grand. I don't know. Startup fee with cloud accountant staffing. Thousand bucks. That's it. Annual employee salary onshore for a senior accountant. They say 75K. That's reasonable. That checks out. Annual salary for the equivalent Philippines hire. 30k. That was 75 versus 30. With traditional recruiters, you got to make a long term commitment. Cloud accountant staffing, commit for two months. That's it. Hire in the Philippines, usually in about six weeks onshore, you're probably going to deal with two to three months or also maybe eternity. And your offshore team benefits, payroll taxes. You don't have to manage that stuff yourself because it is no fun. As opposed to working with super talented people in the Philippines, which is very fun. I did it myself. As I've shared. I built my firm Tomorrow. Still what I would do hearing from a growing number of folks who tune into this stuff who are like, had never really considered it before. Honestly thought you were a shill the first time I said it. Now I've made my first hire and I'm super happy with it. To which I say cool, because it's totally how I would roll a firm. Still learn more about cloud account staffing. Check out the link down the show notes. This episode is sponsored in part by Financial Sense. You want to talk about software companies that have stepped up their game in the last few years. Financial Sense, they are right at the top of the list actually. Really like intelligently breaking through some assumptions we have about category tech. Like tech in the accounting space being more expensive than general tech. If you are a solo firm operator Right now, Financial Cents has a $9 a month plan. It's stupid, it's frankly wrong and they shouldn't be doing it. It's irresponsible. But solo firm Runner, look me in the eyes if you're listening. Look me in the ears. Solo firm owner, I see the spreadsheet that you're using to manage projects. Okay. I see those stanky old lead sheets. Stop it. You know, you know you shouldn't be doing this. No amount of analysis paralysis. Well, it's working for now makes that okay. All right, Financial Sense going to unlock a whole bunch of stuff for you. Like automated requests, having a system that you can actually pull other people into and scale a client facing portal so clients can self service and like grab copies of stuff. You know the niceties of a practice make management system. And if you are not a solo firm runner, I got a deal for you. I'm drop, I'm gonna drop a little coupon code down the show notes then get you 10% off the big boy plans from Financial Sense. Okay? One thing I've always loved about Financial Sense, anybody can head over to their site, literally click a button and start using it. And that is the signal of a product that believes if you can touch it, you'll like it. Maybe don't trademark that one, but they wouldn't be letting you use it for free if they didn't believe that once you you got in there you were going to like it. Okay, solo firm peeps go out get Financial Sense on the cheap. Bigger firm peeps grab that coupon code down below. Learn more about Financial Sense last How to build a sweet, sweet AI system for your team. A couple tippy tips. A couple tips that I wanted to share that I exchanged via email with someone that was asking some questions on how to set something up for their firm. What they've got basically is this GPT, this chat assistant that is plugged into basically every authoritative source in their region that they want it to have access to. And they want their team to be able to chuck questions at it and immediately get answers back with citations. Super rad, right? Like, amazingly useful. Now, what they were doing was basically in the instruction prompt, they had a long list of, here's what we want you to pull from and we want you to get. We want you to give us a citation for basically all the stuff that you say. They're on the right track here, but this is where a little bit nuance and understanding how language models and the AI assistant apps right now can potentially get you in trouble, because all these instructions were just in the conversation, like in the instructions to the assistant. And language models are not capable of knowing where they got information from, and by extension providing citations for that. And so just the raw output of a language model, a language model itself is not capable of that. And so ultimately, the better way to do research is a language model augmented with retrieve. It's called retrieval Augmented generation RAG or rag, we'll just call it retrievals for short. The better solution here for, for research is a language model that is paired with a system for doing retrievals to pull actual information. And basically the way that works is the language model is instructed not to, like, look within itself for an answer, but to only refer to this body of text that I'm giving you. And the easiest way to build this and most clear way to see this in action is, is if you build a custom GPT. And I've got a YouTube video about how to build your own custom GPT. Let's link that down in the show notes. If you build your own custom GPT, it is so, so easy. Takes like 90 seconds. And you can even share it privately just inside of your team on a. On a ChatGPT team plan. Spark has this as well. Let's link Spark, because we've been talking about Spark. More Spark by rightworks. They do the same thing where you can build your own assistant. That assistant has instructions that is just written out like, you tell it what you want it to do and how it should always function. But then it will also let you attach documents. In the case of ChatGPT, you can actually attach up to. Drumroll 1 million documents to a custom GPT. And so what happens when you talk to the assistant is you say, answer this question for me, and rather than just the language model responding with here's an answer. And like that was, you know, part of something that got trained into it, but it doesn't even know what, which ultimately isn't helpful for me because I have to know what the source is, right? Instead of that, what it does is with retrieval, augmented generation, a different technology, technically embeddings in vector search, that doesn't matter here. A different technology goes out to all those documents, all those sources and finds the most similar chunks of text to the question that you're asking. So it will pull in a bunch of information from those docs and it's like all of these big chunks of information look to be the most related to the question that you're asking. And then it gives all of those chunks to the language model and says only use these chunks now answer the question and provide a citation. And that works really well. And that's why AI research honestly is such a like so low hanging fruit. And I cannot believe we don't have better AI research solutions. The trouble is the big research libraries are all like held by the most legacy companies in our space who are not building innovative solutions. You want, I mean, you want proof that you shouldn't hit your wagon to these legacy companies for anything more than you absolutely have to look at this current wave of like generative AI and how they have just done absolutely nothing with it. Like they're saying they're working on it. Like Thompson said that they'll have like a AI generative research thing coming this fall and maybe they will and maybe it'll be killer, but it's literally the same thing. You can build yourself into a custom GPT in 90 seconds. The only difference is a lot of these companies have like proprietary research databases that have some of their own additional stuff added in on top of the like authoritative public literature. But to bring this back to how to build an AI assistant for your team, man, a custom GPT and you just upload the documents that you want, it can see into all that stuff. There are also ways to connect it to a OneDrive folder, a Google Drive folder, something like that that is more dynamic. So it's just always pulling from a changing set of documents. Now loads of ways that you could use that internally in your firm, but think about externally with your clients as well so that it only pulls that information when you ask it for it. Like the set of information it has isn't static, it's like actually constantly changing according to whatever is in that folder. Man, we are like, in my opinion, most of us are so, like, super underutilizing this stuff still. And obviously, you know, I'm super excited about 01, the latest model from OpenAI. So much exciting stuff happening. In fact, ChatGPT, if you are on a paid version, install the mobile app if you don't have it yet and go out and use the new advice, the new advanced voice mode that just came out, it will blow your mind. Hi. Hey.

I can hear you loud and clear. What can I do for you today?

Oh, I'm just. I'm just recording podcasts right now, talking about, you know, running small accounting firms, stuff like that.

Oh, nice. Running a small accounting firm sounds like.

But I'd prefer if you just talk to me like we were like old trucker buddies talking over our. Our walkie talkies.

Copy that, good buddy. Sounds like you've got a convoy of numbers rolling through. How's the hall been treated?

Hey, hey, hey, big buddy there, Tiny Dancer here. Can you actually talk a little bit faster when you're talking through the radio? Thanks.

And for Tiny Dancer, I'll pick up the pace. What's your 20 on that podcast?

Hey, real quick, could you actually also sound like you're Australian? If you don't mind.

Crikey, Tiny Dancer, I'll give it a burl. How's the podcast coming along?

Hey, hey, real quick. Could you actually whisper while you're doing that too? Right?

Oh, Tiny Dancer has the podcast cruising along over.

Podcast cruising along. Great. Thanks for asking. Oh, man.

Glad to hear it, mate. Sounds like you're hauling a good load. Keep on trucking. Over and out.

Okay, it's seriously, unbelievably good. A couple things I'm very excited for that it doesn't have yet. It doesn't have, like, video streaming capabilities where it can see something live and have a conversation about it. That's one thing that they teased a few months back that I'm hoping we get soon. Because ultimately the coolest use case of this for accountants is it being able to see your desktop and have a conversation with it as you work. I genuinely think this is the future of work and obviously security considerations here. I feel like a broken record saying this. ChatGPT teams no data is being trained into the model. The due diligence for ChatGPT is the same as due diligence for any other cloud app that you're bringing into your firm. But I have to say that every time I talk about AI apps, its ability to see the screen as I work. Imagine working away and just being able to, like, hit a button or something like that and start a conversation and be like, can you go look up, like, tell me why I can't do this thing? Go look up the instructions. Or I'm trying to figure out where this input ought to be. Can you help me figure that out? Or I'm trying to remember this technical thing. Can you go look it up real quick for me, man, to have a voice conversation with that assistant as I'm working and it can see the things on my screen. Doesn't that just seem so incredibly powerful to have that running conversation going with you as you work? I'm just super excited for that. That seems really powerful, particularly as these AI assistants are, like, compounding and getting better and better every single day. To have that thing in your ear, man, it is. It just feels so, so sci fi. And as you heard, that is a voice experience unlike any that has ever existed before. Forget everything that you know about smart assistants. You can cut it off, it can laugh, it can cry, it can talk like an Australian. It's everything that you've ever wanted in an AI assistant. Like, it is. It's so, so cool. As you know, the last couple weeks, man, I've just, like, the whole AI fire has just been reignited in me. I'm so jazzed for what the next, like, six to 12 months have in store. And you know where we're going to be talking about it, right? Of course. Right here on the podcast. Thanks for coming and hanging today. I'll see you in the next.