337 3 Ways To Make Junior Accounting Staff Higher Output

Yo, real talk. Being a junior at an accounting firm is the worst. All the stories I have of just being thrown into the most ridiculous situations and they're like, well, we'll see if we figures it out. I don't know. That is the mold that many of us were cast in. So how can we do better for the juniors we bring into our team not only to like actually help them progress and find success in the accounting industry, but so that they actually get stuff out the door and make money for my firm? You know, I got thoughts. Do I got thoughts today. Three ways to make those wee baby juniors more productive and if you're a junior, some practical things you can take to the big boss to say big boss, this is what I need to succeed. Enable me. Let's do it. This may surprise you to learn, but when I came out of undergrad I didn't go straight into a big firm. Even though that was like the success metric of the accounting program. And I think that's how it is for just about all of them. The percentage of accountants they place into to big firms. And the reason I didn't want to do that is I hated audit because how could you not honestly? And I also didn't want to just go do like travel for years. Man, starting in like going into big firms like that is, it's. I don't know how people do it. Bless your hearts. But it wasn't for me. And so I got a internship between my software and junior year at this four person firm in the town that I grew up in. And it was the, the legacy est firm you have ever seen in your life. And they did tax work. And I don't know if I'd say that I liked it as much as at that age. All I cared about was it paid better than any of my buddies internships. And I knew it was a game that I could win honestly was actually a really big part of it, which life advice. The default path for most of us, like we're all hustling in the game that's kind of defined by everybody around us, right until you're. Unless you are doing your own thing, like you're, you're kind of living and working in an environment where success is what everybody around you tells you that it is. And early in my career, the big motivator for me was I looked around and I was like, okay, okay, I can do this. Like I think I can, I can find success here. But I never stopped to consider when I would look at the people who were successful there. And, and for most folks that's like, what's, what's the partner track look like here? That may, that may feel even unattainable, but like that's kind of the peak, right? Like that is the top of the mountain. And you're so like busy running on that hamster wheel as hard as you can that you don't see the tear stains on, on the lapel of the partner. You know what I mean? You don't stop to actually consider, if I got there, is that a thing I would actually want to do for the rest of my life? Man, Oftentimes the answer is no. Oftentimes what partner is, is not like a big step in compensation. It's a, it's more of a prison sentence. Because if you didn't like your job before partner, you're not going to like your job when you become partner now. It's just going to be harder to leave. Anyways, I got out of school, went to a small firm. So many good stuff I had to just do an episode of just stupid stories from this firm at some point. Great people there, with some exceptions. But the very first project I ever got in this tax firm was, I could still remember the company's name. It was a C corp that hadn't filed in like four years. And we were doing an old three years of returns. Shows you the quality of client that this firm accepted. They didn't have any books. We had a pile of bank statements and things from personal bank statements that had been like circled and scrawled on. And they said, here's QuickBooks, here's Pro System FX, 19 year old, knock yourself out. I didn't know what realization or I didn't know what, how accounting firms worked at that point at all. But that exercise I don't think was ultimately helpful for anybody. I mean, you want to talk spinning your wheels. Like I was in another dimension for about three weeks and it was the most pointless exercise of, well, see what you can do. See how far you can get it. Look at last year and when you put juniors in this position and we do this all the time to varying degrees because you just don't want to have to take the time to like hold their hand through it. And I think with dudes, oftentimes there's an element of like this, this is going to be an important, this will be a valuable lesson for them. When it's like, no, it's, it's actually your pocketbook that this is setting on fire. But there's so Many situations like this where you have totally unsystematized firms and you just chuck people in and expect a lot of them. And the worst part of being a junior accountant was those afternoons where you came off a lunch, maybe you ate a little too much, so things slowed down and you're staring at your screen and you're stuck on something and you're like, who? The hours are flying by right now and I'm not making any progress. What the heck am I going to put on my timesheet? The real creative canvas of an accountant, while simultaneously staying out of the way of everybody around you because you don't look like an idiot having to ask all these questions, getting stuck every 10 minutes, that is the life of a junior accountant. It, it is brutal. It is a social thing, honestly, more so than it is a technical thing, because most firms are just completely lacking that support structure. So if I can, if I can give you three wee tidbits of wisdom to try to make junior folks as helpful as possible, and this doesn't even really apply to technical people. This could be a va, could be an admin. If you work with other people and you're the boss, all three of these things apply and set those people up for success. I honestly, it wasn't until I became the person that was in charge of, you know, hiring and, and attracting talent and all of that, where I had like, more of an interest in ensuring that the people we brought in had a good experience. It wasn't until I was at that stage in my firm running journey that I actually felt a more of a moral responsibility to like, onboard new people properly and give folks the support that they need. It is, it is no small thing for somebody to be under your employee. I mean, like, that is, that is their livelihoods. And to walk into that haphazardly and not create the system that can oftentimes lead to virtually anyone being successful like your system is, is so bad that it requires a unicorn, a phenom, like some exceptional person to be able to somehow navigate that and figure all that out, then, boy, you are. You're just setting up a lot of people for failure. If you're not thinking about that and accounting firms, admittedly, like, we're not. I don't know. What's the thing that's very turnkey a manufacturing line? I don't know. For whatever reason, what we do feels very abstract and hard to put on rails, but that's not a reason to not try. It's a spectrum of how systematized we can be. So my first, like, big suggestion of how you get more out of junior folks. And if you are a junior folk, and I know a lot of you listen to this show, this is something to really push for that will make you more productive is to just get back to the fundamentals of how do we systematize the work that we do even more. This should always be something that we are working on trying to do just a little bit better. And there's so many situations where we're like, well, we're never going to be able to do 100% of that. And as a result, we do 0% of it. When it's like, no. The goal is to get from 5 to 10, from 10 to 12, from 12 to 14. How do we systematize a little bit more of it? That should be the goal. And it all starts with getting down to what are the services that we deliver to people? Like, getting down to brass tacks. We spent a whole week on this. A couple of months ago, I recorded a whole week of pods from the passenger seat of a minivan. It was quite the experience. But we built out this huge service library template that anybody can swipe. Amazing feedback from that. If you haven't swiped that, go back and check out those episodes. Let's link the first one down in the show notes. But the value of this services library is it puts a language and a framework to all of the things that you're willing to do for accounting firms. And this is a hard thing to do because most accounting firms, what they do is a product of what clients ask them to do. And it's actually very different across different client engagements. So it becomes very difficult to standardize. Right. Especially if you built that firm from scratch. You were at a point where you're like, bro, I'll do just about anything for anybody. There was a. I mean, I. When I bought my firm, the bigger a firm is, the more there is like these unbelievable things where you turn over a rock and you're like, what? We do? What? There was. There was a company that for the last 40 years, we'd been doing payroll for. And we would print their payroll checks and somebody would drive out to this place in rural Oregon and put the payroll checks under a wooden mallard. This is not a joke. A mallard. That was outside. That was the process. And it had been done this way for decades. In many ways, I absolutely love it. But it's a great example of how, like every engagement, unless there is something that is forcing them into standardization Every engagement, the natural order of things is they will all become more different over time. But a funny thing happens when you have a service library. You have a not a menu, but like a library of different things that you do for people. Simply creating the language and the process for it has the opposite effect. You actually find that the work that you do for clients trends towards that standardization. But until that standardization exists, it does the opposite. It trends the other direction. It gets more unique over time. This episode is brought to you in part by Live Flows. So you've 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 Live Flow 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. It'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. Will 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're 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. They're paying her 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 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, you know, 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 shared before my last four hires were in the Philippines at my firm. Completely changed the way we approach getting the work done. And that is again how I would build a new firm tomorrow. To learn more about team up, check out the link down in the show notes. And so the first step towards systematizing is having a service library where which is a really hard thing to wrangle if you don't have any degree of it right now to sit down and assess what are all the different things that we do for people. But the way to think about that is this is the worst that it will ever be. And by going through this exercise we're now getting it baby step at a time closer to standardization. Because where we don't have systems, we become overly reliant on expertise. And I had this problem in my firm big time. We had to go out and just hire loads and, and loads of senior tax people who could do anything and then we would throw any old project at them. And because they were like these Swiss army knife type folks who you had to pay a bunch of money for and you couldn't really find those people, they could, they could handle all of those projects. But on that spectrum of how standardized you are, if you can make that work turnkey, you become much, much less reliant upon expertise. And there's a hundred examples of this firms doing the same work and totally different ways. There's a lot of firms now where all of the information gathering is done by admins. And for other firms they're like, that's unthinkable. Like those firms are dumb. They're delivering a poor level of service. Like there's no way an admin can do this because they don't know the questions to ask. But then the other end of the spectrum, the counter argument is like, oh really? Like your professional staff should be the ones following up with your clients throughout tax season and wasting all of this time just chasing people for documents rather than the admin being able to do, you know, 90% of it and the project doesn't even touch the professional's desk until we have 90% of it. Those systems ultimately for many firms right now can be the way out of being hiring blocked. We had a bunch of things in my firm that ultimately we've talked a lot lately about the pre accounting process. That was something where I had like six figure professionals were going out and logging into online platforms to fetch documents and balances and stuff, stuff like that. It's ridiculous to say out loud and it's not a hard thing, but because we didn't have a system for how to do pre accounting, for how to do all of the fetching because we wanted it to be automated. But there were a bunch of cases where it still wasn't and all the cases where it wasn't, the pros were still going out and doing all that. But then when we made a system that said this is how we do pre accounting, for every single monthly client engagement, we have an explicit list of all the stuff we gotta pull. Here's the person in charge of going out and pulling all that stuff. When we put a system together, it became something that an admin could do. We just arbitraged a whole Bunch of time that was senior level time to instead being admin time. And then the even better thing is we found once they fetched that stuff like, oh, they can actually go put it in the workpaper file and they can rename it and they can annotate it and they can do a whole bunch of stuff that was normally work paper prep that doesn't require a technical person to do. If you look at your most senior people and the things that they do every single day, there's a tremendous amount of waste there. That is generally due to a lack of systems having to follow up with clients, having to download attachments from an email or from your client portal and put it in the proper destination. What if instead you had a process for how all of those things got handled as they came in? You have a process, anybody can do it. You don't have a process, the wrong person's probably doing it. Tippy, top tip number two for squeezing every last drop of productivity out of those juniors, embed them with seniors. When I was a junior, honestly at kind of the two firms I came of age at, I felt like a, like pariah, maybe that's too extreme of a word, but we got chucked into like the junior bullpen. The seniors had their own offices and all that stuff. But there was a divide there. The know nothings had one part of the office and the big bosses had another part. And one thing I found going through the process of like being the first person in my accounting firm, my 80 year old accounting firm that ever let, you know, somebody into my inbox to help with my email, the first one to ever have an assistant. Like I did all of these things in this very traditional firm that were unthinkable. And the legacy folks are like, oh wow, you're the kind of person needs an assistant or oh, you can't handle your own inbox yourself. Like, as I navigated those things, I learned, holy smokes, is there a lot of trivial things that I was wasting my time on that somebody else can help me with? And those tasks that are trivial to you and that you don't need to be doing can literally change the life of another professional because for them it's upskilling. It's something that they wouldn't otherwise have access to. And evolving the role of someone in your practice and, and helping them to develop professionally at the end of the day is a product of what tasks are they responsible for. Do they do the same thing year over year? In most cases they do. Sometimes they'll get new clients or something like that, but they're by and large doing the same work year over year. And if I'm the big boss, if I have a conversation with them about them being able to do more and growing into more complex things and taking on new responsibilities, then I have to create the environment that will allow for them to shed tasks in order for them to add higher value tasks. So delegation isn't, oh, wow, you can't do it yourself. Wow, you, look at you, you said a big deal. You need this, you need, you need all this help with all these different things. Delegation is not admitting defeat or getting too big for your britches. Delegation is investing in other people. You're shedding that stuff for them. It is now their highest value task. And you are also growing. You're getting into the more important stuff. And when you have somebody that works really closely with you, you get to see, oh, wow, yeah, no, you could actually like hop in and do this and that for me, and this thing's going to take me the next 40 minutes. Can you just do this for me? You have that stuff all the time, but so does every one of your seniors. So do your staff. They get that client that sends them the ridiculous pile of documents and they're like, this is going to be such a pain. But oftentimes they don't feel like they have permission to go out and ask another member of the to help. And before you know it, you've got seniors that are capable of, you know, super technical stuff, spending 80% of their time on, on admin or things that are not at all like, pushing the limit of that noodle. But for a junior, if they have like a dedicated go to junior that they work super closely with, that's a fantastic opportunity for the junior to be useful. I mean, arguably, arguably the best thing a junior can do is free up the time of a senior. But getting it to see into how that senior works really, really closely, like, that's also super beneficial. They're seeing how they approach problem solving, client communication, all these things that I would argue they're actually getting more isolated from over time now, especially as we're like into distributed work and you don't have that same adjacency with your co, with your colleagues to a degree. I think you actually have to recreate that. You almost have to force that now if you run a distributed team. And the best way to do that now, I think is by like developing these pods of seniors, juniors, sometimes even admins. Another big blocker for seniors is Always delegation, because you don't just roll out of bed one day and understand how to delegate things. But if they have members of the team there that are like, no, they're part of your pod, like they're there to support you, if they have a really clear line there, that, that is the expectation, then delegation is something that just kind of happens more naturally. Like they're doing it every single day. And just like you, pushing tasks off of your plate to someone else enriches their role. Seniors being able to push tasks off of their plate to the junior and they sit down and they show them how to do that and they give them feedback on how they did it. Like that is growing your juniors faster than, a whole lot faster than you do. If you just send that junior out to work on a big project and they spin their wheels until the end of time. Right. Last one, number three. This is a bit of a hot take, I would argue, actually a really big thing over the next few years for juniors will be cutting juniors loose with AI. Okay, let me, let me explain myself there. So a lot of the studies we've seen to date around benchmarking worker productivity with AI versus not with AI, so they give them some training, they give them an AI tool to use. A lot of these studies have been around consulting because that's like all the written stuff, like that's something that language models have been able to do pretty darn good for a while now. Not the technical stuff so much, but being able to write reports for you based on, based on, you know, sets of data, that sort of thing. And so they, they run these studies benchmarking a group that gets some basic AI training and they show them how to use it versus a group that doesn't have that AI tool. And they, the the biggest trend they see, and I've seen this in a number of studies now and is it raises the bar for the underperformers or for the juniors. It pulls everybody up to a higher standard and the biggest people that it impacts are the juniors. This episode is brought to you in part by cloud account 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. Fifteen grand. I don't know. Startup fee with cloud account stabbing. 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, six weeks onshore. You're probably gonna 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 cause 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, if I built my firm tomorrow, it's 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 tire and I'm super happy with with it. To which I say cool because it's totally how I would roll a firm. Still learn more about Cloud Accountant staffing. Check out a link down in the show notes this episode of Sponsor 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 Sense 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 gonna 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 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 in the show notes, then get you 10% off the big boy plans from Financial Cents. 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 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 got in there, you were gonna like it. Okay, solo firm peeps go out, get Financial Sense on the cheap. Bigger firm peeps grab that coupon code down below and learn more about Financial Sense. Let me read you this quote from Paul Graham that I think totally applies to accounting as well. He said, I learned something interesting from the CEO of a fairly big tech company. Usually 28 year olds are more productive programmers than 22 year olds because they have more experience. But apparently 22 year olds are now as good as 28 year olds because they're more at ease using AI. And AI for the youths, like this is going to be a whole thing. Roblox, the little kid video game. You've got a built in AI assistant in Roblox where you tell it what you want to build and it'll like give you a template to build that thing for you. Those assistants these days are built into everything. And my children are just going to have the expectation that there is an assistant that will just be able to snap their fingers and do whatever they want it to do. I mean, it's like when you see, you know, when you saw the first iPad kids, when you saw that generation just being able to hustle a device and you're like, holy smokes. Like they are, they are built different because they were able to do that stuff from a young age and you weren't AI assistants. It's absolutely the same thing. We're going to have a generation of workers who went through high school using ChatGPT to write essays, doing all these things. They have a deep understanding of how to hustle these things because it got them through school, because like it got their work out the door. And when they come into your workforce, they're going to have a different set of capabilities than anybody else in your firm. And I think most likely what this does is raises the bar for the youths, for the juniors. And a extremely practical example of this right now is the example I've been pumping on my newsletter, on social media and all that. We've got this new model, this O1 preview model from OpenAI that does like deeper reasoning. It is off the charts on like PhD level mathematics, stuff like that. Remember when everybody said large language models weren't any good at math? Owen is now better at math than almost any human being on the planet. That took, you know, all of 12 months. But the test I've been putting it through, that I've really been kind of like trying to communicate to folks is putting a balance sheet in front of it and having it do a high level review of just a standalone balance sheet and identifying potential issues to look into. Because when I ran this test on the podcast, as you may have heard, and by and large identified the exact same items that I did. And there are items that go across the desk of a senior accountant every single day of stuff they go back and they tell the staff to fix. And so I put that out there and I asked accountants, I said, first of all, what do you think of this? Like, did this land with you the same way that it did with me? And by and large, it did. But then I also asked, where do we put this to work? What's the most useful application of this? And 90% of people actually went the exact same way that I did. Where they're like, this would be an invaluable first review for the prepare. Because it is hard when you're a preparer to like take your prepare hat off and then spin around and now review the work that you just put together. Right? Like, that's always been a challenge for all of us. But if I can put it into this AI assistant and it gives me a high level thing list of potential issues to look into. And then the second prompt that we did was like this worker prompt where he gave it the general ledger detail and it digs in to see like, is this actually an issue and what are some potential solutions? How do I adjust it to fix it? If you are a junior who would have otherwise shot that balance sheet right across the reviewer's desk with those issues, if you now do that work with the help of an AI assistant, what has it done? It has raised the bar for every single one of you juniors. I think this may be the biggest short term impact of AI and gang. I think it's already here. Like, we have 01. Like we have with very basic prompting, chucking that balance sheet and chatgpt. We have very real world examples of it calling out issues that bookkeepers get wrong every single day. And I see a lot of, I see a lot of accountants grappling with what's the right way to do AI. And there's, there's the whole security thing. And every time I bring up AI, the security thing comes up. It comes to AI security. Make sure that your prompts aren't being trained into the model. And, and if you're on a business plan with any of the mainstream AI assistants now, ChatGPT, Google Cloud, like this is no longer the case. It's not happening at all. Your prompts are not being trained into the model. And that is the only thing that is different about AI models are your prompts being trained into the model. And now that that's no longer the case on business plans, you just need to look at it through the lens, the same lens you would any other cloud app. Does it let me do things like enable multifactor authentication? Does it have, you know, SOC type 2 security? And these models, like they have HIPAA compliant ways of working with like they are secure in many cases actually much more secure than very common apps in the accounting space. And so like, I don't know, people are still stuck on, on the, the AI spookies because, because it's new and because of some of the issues that there were really early days with AI and there were issues, but we've gotten past that and, and I actually think AI getting really good is going to force some discomfort where you still got some never AI ers and it's like really, you're going to sit on the sideline when it can enable X, Y and Z for you? I mean if you use tax workflow tools, the current crop of tax workflow tools sit on top of these same language models, like that's what makes them really, really good. And so like we gotta do the homework like develop an AI usage policy. I developed a free one that anybody can swipe. We can link the YouTube video for that down below. So we got to get past that. But as the big bosses at firms are like, I feel like I should do something AI, what should I do? I think the way to implement AI is actually bottom up, not top down. If you roll out a new practice management system, for example, that's top down, you got a big like six month plan, you're doing training, you're doing all these things, you learn what all the different buttons and knobs do, right? And you, you roll that out in a very methodical way. AI is almost the opposite. I think you want to do it bottom up because the people who will benefit most from it are not you, it's the juniors, it's the folks who probably already have a good degree of comfort with, with AI assistance, get it in their hands, see what they can do with it. Like show them those one examples that I've been sharing the last couple of weeks and say, hey, just do this now before you send that thing off for review. Chuck it into here and it might save you a couple review points that you would otherwise get back from the reviewer. I think, honestly, I think we're already there. Like, if I was a junior right now, just coming out of school and I had just written my senior thesis with ChatGPT, when I come into the workplace, you better believe I'm going to be going to AI assistance to get help with my work. And if I'm the boss, I want to enable that. Like I got to set the boundaries with my AI usage policy to say what is okay and what is not okay. But I think AI is actually about to make juniors much higher output. Now, a couple like closing sort of over the top considerations when it comes to getting really good juniors into your firm. Accountants by and large are not rad places to work. Like they, they just aren't. And the biggest problem in most cases is the accounting firm like doesn't have a sort of guiding principle, like a singular vision that people are behind. And it's oftentimes general firms that will struggle with this. Like, you don't have a specific profile of people that you're going out and trying to help. And for the next generation of worker, it's not enough to get a paycheck and be excited about the work that they do. And I get that. That's like not how it's always been. Reality is that's, that's just how it is today. And in my opinion, like, this is another argument in favor of firms specializing a little more. If you have an avatar of the type of person that you want to support and you're passionate about that thing, not only does it become easier to attract clients who need that specific thing your firm can deliver, but the same goes on the hiring side as well. You can find folks that are passionate about that same thing. You are differentiated from other accounting firms and fundamentally have more to offer to that employee because of that specificity. Super tough to find, like super capable onshore junior folks these days. And as they come out of undergrad, like the vast majority of them are going to much larger firms than we run. So easier said than done. But don't be afraid to have something to say. In professional services in general, I think firms are oftentimes afraid to have an opinion when increasingly people make buying decisions because they want to feel like they belong where they're spending their money. Like if they find that firm, that's like, yeah, that's, I totally Agree with that. That's actually become a really big factor in how people spend their money and who they partner with. And when it comes to, like, the next generation's workforce, man, they are totally the same way. There is not a willingness there to go and toil if they don't feel like they're having an impact. Like, if they can't see the bigger picture there. And I would say that's probably one of the bigger blockers to attracting talented folks to come work for your firm is just kind of being too vanilla, like, not having anything to say. And it stems honestly from the same fear that specialization fears, like, come from. You think about all the people that you will close out by having something to say or how that maybe doesn't align with everyone that you have today when you're like, no, like, we got to make the right decisions for. For the next client we're going to bring in for the next employee that we're going to hire. Because it is that. That having a voice and having a vision, that is what sets you apart. And, like, the massive number of firms out there and everyone that's. That's shouting, come over here and I'll do your tax work. And TurboTax Live, you, like, sign up right now, you're going to get this deal. Like, that's how you stand out is when you actually have something interesting to say. But boy, man, being a junior was rough. It's almost like raising kids where you're like, no, my problems are more important than yours. So it's not me worth, you know, stressing over this thing you're stressing about or helping you out. But just think about, ultimately the impact that you have on these people's career trajectory. Like, there is a very real moral, moral obligation there if you're a junior and anything here got you excited, man. Share a little clip with the boss on YouTube. You can share, like, specific timestamps. If the AI thing got you excited, send that over. The service library thing, send that over. Much of my new followers come on board begrudgingly because you referred me to your colleagues. So thank you very much when you do that. That's all we got for today. Thanks for hanging. Go make a killer place for juniors to.