338 Accounting Firm Websites Are Dead ☠️ Build This Instead

Incoming hyperbole. Accounting firm websites are dead because you should be building something else instead. We're going to talk about it today. Accounting firms have never been worse than they are today. But I would say bigger picture. Like, bigger picture trends, websites, landing pages in general. I don't know that people really give a hoot about those things quite like they used to. So what does that mean for accounting firms? And what should we be doing instead? Come on in. You know, we're going to talk about it. Let's dig in. Okay. My hope is that this connects the dots for some of us who grapple with the notion of, like, I'm not a marketer, I'm an accountant man. But we also understand that ultimately running a good accounting firm boils down to the quality of the clients that you have on your client list. Right. And I, I think this is like a, just a real practical, practical tidbit you can be thinking about that's going to make all of your marketing efforts. Hang on, let me, let me put quotation marks around that marketing efforts, like, like supercharge them, like, get more out of them. So rather than thinking in terms of what my website is and what it does and updating the copy there, think about your website in terms of what the next squeeze page you build will be. Never heard the term squeeze page. In short, the sole purpose of a squeeze page is to get somebody to give you their email address. It is focused on a single call to action. We're going to, we're going to give them something. We're going to give them access to a framework or something like that in exchange for their email address. And the value of this all comes back to the notion that these days, most accounting firms, they are like a walled garden. You could be doing amazing things, but the only people that ever learn about it are, are those who are on your client list. And that's a really high barrier to entry. And it means that people aren't willing to like, wade in to learn a little bit more without a whole bunch of social proof or something going disastrously wrong in their past professional relationship. And one thing we don't think about enough is actually the quality of people who will just stumble into a website and make a buying decision based on that or a Google review. And I know it's a thing, and increasingly we, we all do that more. And, but imagine you're running half million to $3 million business and you literally are having to turn to Google or having to turn to some random landing page to make a buying decision for your accountant. Like to determine which firm you're going to work for. That's not a great place to be in, right? The best clients to work with, in my opinion, are either making those buying decisions based on social proof, they see people that they look up to having success with this solution, or. Or they've built some sort of relationship with someone at that firm. So maybe that's a podcast, maybe that's their social media content, that sort of thing. And the people who are just like skulking landing pages, in all likelihood, those aren't super high quality clients. But if our firms are just this walled garden where the only people who get anything from us are those that are on the client list, then nobody's getting a taste. And every single person that scrolls past one of your posts on social media or comes to your website and then bounces, which, by the way, there are probably 500 of those for every one client you have, maybe more. Every one of those people will pass you by and in most cases, unless you're producing content and building a relationship with them, will never think about you again. Like, you have absolutely no fingers into their business ever being able to get in touch with them or teach them anything more about what you do. And so what is the next step to open up that circle a little bit? If you have the visualization I always come back to is your, your client list is like this circle, like this body of people. And beyond that is the entire world, the whole universe. Right? Everybody out there. And your client list is this itty bitty little circle. And inside of this circle, you're going to have people with like different packages on your firm. A smaller circle is like, oh, people on the silver package, smaller circle, the gold package, smallest circle, the platinum package. But outside of that, most of us do absolutely nothing. So what's the first step to build another circle outside of that walled garden of you're either a client or you're not a client. It has to be an email list. And I know, it's like you hear the term email list and your mind immediately goes to like, software vendors and how like, you hate trading your email for things. There's a reason that that's the way it is, is because an email address is the easiest way to circle back to someone who is a little bit warm, like a lead that knows a little bit about you. Which if you think about the vastness of all the people who are out there, knowing who that subset of people is, it's really, really valuable. And if you're like me, your mind immediately goes to, okay, well, like, what am I going to do with all those email addresses? Like, I'm not sitting here writing amazing content. Like, what would that even look like? And I'll be honest with you, we're talking about accounting firms here. And the bar of what that would have to look like. It's not, it's not high. It really isn't. It could be as simple as, like getting into renewal season, skimming through that list of maybe it's 50 emails that you got from this, you know, little asset that you give away on this squeeze page. Four steps to, you know, X, Y, Z. And you collected 50 emails from that in the last six months. And you are in kind of the peak season where people are deciding what professional they're going to work with next year. And we're kind of getting into that. Right? It could be as simple as poking around online, figuring out who these people are, figuring out if you have any connections who also know this person and just send them like a one or two line email. Hey, Jim, saw you pop by a few months ago to grab that resource. Hope that was helpful for you. We're taking on about five more clients before we shut the doors. Going into busy season in about three weeks. You need any professional help, just let me know that. I don't know, how uncomfortable does that make you feel? Like the notion of sending an email like that, does that feel slimy? There was a day in my life where that would have been not a day, a decade, probably 15 years where that would have been unimaginable. You mean I am going to send an email to someone asking them to work with me? Do you know how busy my firm is? So let's just acknowledge that that's the gut reaction for most of us, probably. But imagine being on the other side of that. Just think about the state of things for entrepreneurs right now. The quality of help that people get from their bookkeeping firm, from their tax firm. I mean, we, we aspire to do a good job, but we know even how low that level can sink in our own firm sometimes. But if you look at the run of the mill, like the average of firms out there, entrepreneurs are not being taken care of very well by their accounting firms. So imagine being in their shoes. When someone reaches out to you, someone who you've already gotten value from, you were like, oh, they made this thing. And I actually thought it was useful enough. I downloaded it and I read it and I'm like, yeah, that's okay. Maybe it was a video that I watched. Whatever it was, fine. Do you think that their provider is putting out the same kind of value into the world? Almost certainly not. And do you think that person has ever in their life been courted by a professional services firm that they actually think can help them now? We all get a million, you know, cold DMs a day now and cold emails and all that. This isn't that they opted in, they came to you and said, yes, this is a value to me. And in exchange, I'm going to give you my email address. And then when they get an email from you, don't overthink it. Don't tell them all about you. They don't give a hoot about you. They give a hoot about what you can do for them. But keep this super, super simple. Say, notice you grabbed this a couple of months ago. Hope it was valuable for you. I see you do. Xyz. We're taking on another few clients before we shut the doors next month. Simple as that. Might be uncomfortable, but you know what the more important question is? What do you have to lose? Right? If you're convinced that this person is a better client than one of your C or D clients on your list right now, then you're trading up. Then that was absolutely worth doing. And rebuilding a small firm. It just, it starts just like that. One little client at a time, trading a slightly better client for two legacy clients, clients. And every single day, I would argue if you're putting anything out there into the world, social media posts an asset like this every single day. There will be people that pass you by who with a little bit of whining and dining, like just, just a whiff of a professional services provider seeming like they know what they're doing and seeming like they're caring. There are probably people passing you by every single day who would happily take you up if you did the hard thing as an adult to take the first step, even though there's that fear of being rejected, like that even happens in the professional context. And don't lump yourself in with cold message people these days, which are awful. Like we have to cut through that and get ahead of that. In fact, one way you can even do this is actually reply or follow on to the message that was originally sent to them that gave them that asset. So they had that context. They can immediately see the thread. Oh yeah, this is that thing about short term rentals that I downloaded a couple of months ago and I learned that one thing from it. Boom. You just shot up like ahead of every other Internet stranger, because you're not coming to them. They first came to you. That's very, very different. This episode is brought to you in part by liveflow. So you've been around. You probably already know what liveflow does. It connects your accounting ledgers to your favorite spreadsheet app, except 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 pasted in there. Fine. But what Life Flow 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 Lifelong could be your best friend there. It's actually a pretty cool idea. Learn more about LifeLow link down in the show. Notes this episode is sponsored in part by Team up, who helps you find super talented accountants in the Philippines to hire directly. We've been talking a lot about AI recently and this new open AI model and how that could unlock some real really cool efficiencies for accounting practices. And a big misnomer when it comes to offshore hiring is one, that you go low skill when you hire offshore, and two, that AI is like going to Replace offshore. When I hired offshore people into my team, they were, I mean they were just like anybody else in our team. I didn't use them in my firm and client facing roles, although a growing number of firms are doing that. But man, they were like at all levels of the skill spectrum. I think oftentimes because we interact with offshore workers in like low skill context, like support and stuff like that, that makes us think that offshore people can somehow only do low skill things. And it sounds ridiculous to say out loud like no, they're going to do whatever you need on that value ladder. And we got big four firms hiring tens of thousands of people all over the world. So you can find skill anywhere. But interestingly, these language models as we talked about with the studies they're doing on how AI up levels people, the biggest impact is on the low to mid level folks and bringing them up to a more standard senior level. And this is where I hired in my firm I was hiring like 20 somethings, which is usually what I hired, both onshore as well, like folks that I could kind of build from scratch. But these were the folks I was hiring in the Philippines. And what I'm seeing with AI right now would have taken them to senior accounting level so much faster. By having AI as this like dream assistant. It would have made my junior bookkeepers so much higher output. It would have improved the quality of what went to the senior's desk. Absolutely would have impacted how I was running my firm, but I would still be hiring offshore AI or not. I don't think that really changes the calculation. If you want to do direct hiring in the Philippines, check out Team Up. I've talked with a bunch of listeners on the POD lately who have done hires through Team up working with Isaac. They every time I ask them how is the experience or the they're doing a good job, they absolutely love Team up saying that say they're doing great. So if you want to explore that, check out the link to Team up down in the show notes. And that's ultimately the function of a squeeze Page. You're keeping it sweet and simple. You got something really valuable there and you want to get their email address in return for it. Now you could, you could think about like a hundred different things that you can include here. Oh, look at our services over here, over there. Like that only matters if they actually want to do that and they can still find you online. They can still get to your homepage. But this squeeze page, like it doesn't have nav options. It is a single Page as simple as possible. Here's how you get this thing instant access. Give me your email address. And you're seeing these squeeze pages, which are not like a new concept by any means, but you're seeing them more and more in the wild, particularly on LinkedIn as LinkedIn is punishing external links less than any other social media platform. So you're going to see a growing number of LinkedIn posts that actually have a link like right in the body of that LinkedIn post. And right now, at least the algorithm doesn't seem to care as long as you remove the link preview. So if you post a link in there, it does that little pop up image thing, right? Get rid of that pop up image. And the consensus among Internet think people right now is that that doesn't really hurt much. Like how you show up in the algorithm if you do this on Twitter, if you do this on Facebook, putting a link to an external thing in a post will make the algorithm show your post to virtually nobody. Because those platforms don't want people to leave the platform and go somewhere else, right? Like why would they reward you for convincing people to go and leave the platform? But LinkedIn right now, if you look at what all like the leading influencers on LinkedIn are doing, they're pointing you out to like their free resources, this and that. And they are all squeeze pages around a very specific topic. And you might be noticing a theme here that all of this kind of comes back to, to frameworks. So how do I get somebody to give me their email address on that squeeze page? How do I even get them to the squeeze page to begin with? Well, the more specific type of person you're trying to talk to for sure, the easier that gets. Maybe it is nonprofits in Seattle, maybe it's beekeepers in general, maybe it's vet clinics in eastern Texas. If you've worked with many of these people before, you know the most common recurring issues that come up, and this is where we build a framework, you know, five steps to nail your nonprofit financial reporting, Something like that, where somebody's like, yes, this sucks right now, I need some help. And the example I always come back to are the things that are super, super painful for accounting firms, right? So like what are the gnarliest things for accounting firms? Selecting a practice management system. Honestly, software selection of any kind of. Because there's so many companies out there and it's so hard to get like transparent information. The size of a company's marketing budget should not dictate whether or not you Become a buyer, hiring, like finding staff, firing clients. Boy, if I could just hire a service that would do that for me, that'd be great, wouldn't it? But like, those are all the pains that accountants feel most acutely. So like, what's a, what's a framework you could put out there around firing clients? Like, we've got a YouTube video and maybe an actual like, landing page and sort of resource we're going to put together here in the next few weeks. As we're getting past the last tax deadline in the US of the year, we're, we're shifting into who do we want to work with next year. And boy, is that a stressful thing, right? Like, nobody enjoys doing that. But imagine if there was a turnkey framework that could make this as easy as possible for you. You're immediately like 80% don't believe you. But the 20% that thinks maybe I'm not considering something, that 20% is willing to give you my email address to see what you have to say. Right? And that, and that's the whole point of the squeeze page. So like, what are those equivalent issues for the types of clients that you're trying to go after? The, the whole like, concept of a squeeze page and, and building an email list that absolutely feels foreign if it's something that you've never done it before. But consider the before and the after. So you put together something valuable and you share it on social media. We'll run through several different scenarios here. You put together something valuable on social media and you post it. And in this case it's kind of the current state. All you have is a landing page that is probably pretty general, right? You post that thing on social media, maybe you pick up a few followers, maybe you end up having a conversation in the DMs with one of the people who engaged there worth doing. And maybe you pick up some attention and eventually a client from something like that. Compare that to the same LinkedIn post that includes a link to a deeper dive where they're taken to a squeeze page, they provide their email address and they can get, you know, a chart of accounts template or something that honestly is probably gonna be table stakes for you and a much bigger deal to them. But it's gotta hit on a real acute pain where they stop in their tracks and they're like, oh my gosh, yes, if somebody could just give me the solution for this right now, I would happily hand over my email address. In that scenario, when you have a squeeze page, you've now done what every single influencer is trying to do who's posting on social media is convert them from the social media platform to your own like owned audience. Like when you have that email address, it doesn't matter what happens on any social media platforms or anything like that. You can presumably get in touch with them because you have that direct contact info. And this is where like having that one cornerstone framework and that one asset makes every single time that you post on social media more valuable. You're seeing this now more where at the end of every post there's like a plug to say here's what I do and here's my most popular resource. I think the even better version of that is to do that more contextually. Like something we're gonna be rolling out in the next couple few weeks is a practice management system recommendation engine where any accountant can go through, get a recommendation like in 90 seconds or less of one of 7PMs that I recommend for US firms. It's something that people want it for a super long time. You know, it is a really, really hard thing to do to pick one. And you also know as soon as you pick one, you are crippled by this perpetual anxiety around, well, what, what if I didn't pick the right one? I see some new features over on this one over here. Is this one still the right one for me? And so if you're scrolling by and you're like, oh, I can get this in 90 seconds. Why would I not do it? Right? Well, it's going to take you to a squeeze page where you fill out a few details about your firm, then you give me your email address and now I've got you, sucker. Kind of sort of like we, the balancing act is then like, what do you do that information you have to be respectful with it doesn't mean you can just start spamming people. But that is then like this one sort of cornerstone asset that I have. And so then like if I'm posting on LinkedIn, you know, maybe three times a week, maybe one of those posts each week is like, you know, if it mentions, mentions accounting firm tech, there's a little blurb that's like, and don't forget your practice management system is the backbone of, of your tech stack. Check this out. If you want my recommendation for you in 90 seconds, something like that, and I could build that resource once and as I post over the next six to 12 months, how many emails is that going to net me that I wouldn't have otherwise gotten? So if this is kind of overwhelming the notion of building a landing page for this and like building an email list. If this is overwhelming, like just compare A to B. A is having no squeeze page. B doing like ephemeral things on social media. Not really, in most cases capturing any sort of long term relationship there. B is having a call to action that is way lower than that walled garden of going and working with your firm so that you actually capture like 5 to 10x the number of people you could reasonably serve inside of your firm. That that outer circle just got bigger. Another example, let's say somebody asks you to, to give a little talk at like a lunch and learn or something like that. How do we usually plug what we do at the end of this? Well, usually there's like an intro slide that says here's what I do, I'm the owner, principal of blah blah blah cpa. And then I teach them something great and then the last slide is usually something like thank you and you walk off and maybe you have a couple conversations, maybe somebody asks for a card because that's a thing that people still do for some reason and then you all go along your merry way. But that talk you really ought to treat just like you would a social media post. So what's a super painful pain for the people who are in that room? How could I put a QR code up on that screen where they scan it and they get that asset in exchange for their email address? This entire talk may not have otherwise been worth your while, but now is because you have a low barrier call to action where you can send that person through that landing page. I'm doing a talk for the Massachusetts whatever it is Society cpas in November. And so I'll tell you what I'm going to do because I do, I do tons of talks and I go out and do the old dog and pony show. And sometimes it's great, other times it's totally weird because like my vibe speaking is so foreign compared to like the types of folks you have on the speaking circuit. Especially at like state society conferences which are usually just a little more, I don't know what the word is, you know what I mean? But normally I just, I get up, I do the dog and pony show, I say I'm a great content online. If you want to go see it, search my name online, anywhere you'll find me. Honestly, just a terrible call to action, but it's all I've ever done for years. This episode is brought to you in 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 account 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. Higher 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. What I will do at this State Society thing is I have a squeeze page just for this talk. And they're gonna get a number of things if they go to that squeeze page, and we'll use the QR code during the talk. In fact, I may even put it in the corner on, like, every single slide. If they go to that squeeze page, they will one, get a copy of a version of the same talk. So I'm gonna sit here probably in my podcasting setup and more or less do the same talk, record it. It won't be super edited or like a YouTube video or anything like that, but I will give them a version of that talk. Because when you sit down and, like, you go through a super good talk and you're like, wow, like, that was awesome. And like, my bar for myself, if I'm gonna put the time into doing this talk, like, it needs to fundamentally change people. And that's like, people expect that from me, honestly. Like, they pay you to come in and do the keynote. Like, it needs to be transformative. And when you sit through a talk like that, your mind goes to, oh, gosh, Tricia back at the office needed to see that. Oh, this person on my team needs to hear that. We've all experienced this. You may be listening to this podcast, watching a YouTube video, something like that, and you're like, oh, man, I so get this now. But I just wish that my colleague got this or this other person in my life got it in the way that I now get it because I was here. And so for the people in person at that talk, I can provide them the value of, you're gonna have a link to this talk you can share with anybody. In fact, if take a picture of this right now, send it to a member of your team. They can watch this thing. By the time you're back in the office, and you can hit the ground running, it is as if they were here with you. There's a couple other resources. One being, like, the practice management system recommendation, couple other resources that in the context of that talk, I will make available all via the same squeeze page. Basically, I'm bundling. You're getting all of these things. All you gotta do is give me your email address, and it should be absurdly valuable, right? Like, that's what we're trying to get to. I'm going to, you know, tell the story that you all have heard probably a ton of times now of how it took me, you know, 18 months and honestly, hundreds of thousands of dollars of wasted time and effort picking the wrong practice management system because I trusted what a salesperson told me. Rather than going out and talking with other accounting firms and getting some social proof to see what people were actually having success with. That was a fundamental turning point in how I made decisions in my accounting firm. It's an emotional story. People are going to connect with that. And then I'm like, but here's the thing. I've crowdsourced a bunch of feedback from over a thousand firms of what worked and what didn't work. You can go through this little utility, tell me what you're on now. I'll show you a hundred people who are on what you're on now, what they went to, and whether they regret it or not. Talk about a freaking stampede. That's gold, right? And there's a version of that for all of the people that we're trying to serve. That's just one that's very, like, near and dear to us because we feel it so acutely. But I could go and do that talk, and I could be like, you'll find me on social media. I could have a slide talking about this cool PM recommendation thing that I do, and people can be like, scrambling like, oh, when did he post that? Like, some of them might find it, some of them not. But if I just take the time to do a squeeze page just for this talk, which might seem like a lot of work, but it really isn't, then me going and doing that talk becomes super worthwhile for me. I'm going to get, honestly, probably two thirds of the people in the room, I'm going to get their email addresses when otherwise I would have just gotten maybe a few social media followers, which are way less valuable than email addresses. Now you still got to do something with those email addresses. You got to give them some sort of value. You got to make an actual, like, connection, like relationship over email. But it completely changes the value of that talk. For me, one of the things I've been, I've been grappling with a lot as we've got kind of a few projects like this PM thing that we've been working on is historically I've never really sold anything to accountants. I have sold things to software vendors. And within like this universe, we almost sort of treat the, the software vendors as the villains and like, they are pay to play. But for accountants, it's free and it's based in, I think, a fundamental discomfort with selling things that I think almost all of us have. And I've gotten to the realization lately that that ultimately is a disservice to my ability to help people if I fundamentally believe. Let's just, let's just talk about the PM thing. Let's just roll it back to PMs. And I'll be honest with you, like a tipping point for this was a couple of weeks ago when we had kind of the Envio versus Carbon conversation. A couple people hopping in the comments. Thank you for doing so. Saying, saying we're thinking about going to onvio. Very disappointed to hear you say that. It's hot, hot doo, doo. Um, can you elaborate on that statement? And I'm like, well, I've just kind of heard from people that like, nobody likes it. I don't know anybody running a killer firm that's using it. So I went out to social media. I went to LinkedIn, went to Twitter, put up a poll. I said, give me your inputs. And nobody would ever go to onvio if they saw those social media posts. But you know how many people we might have just saved years of wasted effort by doing that. A lot. And I've been there. That was me. I wasted. It was probably three years. It took us 18 months to get to the decision, the implementation day. And then a few months in, we're like, nope, this is the wrong one. But can we change right now? We sure can't. We had to then wait two years to go to a different platform. So it was really like three and a half years that that one bad decision cost me. And so how do I help as many people as possible to prevent them from making the same mistake? I could just do it at my own goodwill. I could post on social media about it every single day. Some people will see it. The bigger, more ambitious Version of that, it goes further. It's paid acquisition. It's proactively going out and doing more talks to get in front of most accountants who don't live online. Right. The reality is getting somebody to pay you for the thing that you do is the flywheel that lets you do it for more people. And it is my own discomfort with being willing to sell things that gets in the way of that. And, man, this goes clear back to my accounting firm running days. I have to imagine almost every one of you listening to this has a version of the same thing in your accounting firm. But if you believe in the dog food that you are selling, stop being afraid of selling it, of. Of marketing it in a more impactful way of finding someone that actually needs what you do, rather than just gripes and complains about the bill, about how this wasn't fast enough, this or that, because you're actually not solving meaningful problems for them because they aren't a great fit for you. This is something I've been grappling with a lot that. That I think comes from a belief of the importance of what I'm doing. And if you feel like if you are truly convicted that what you're doing is going to have a positive impact on the world, then get out of your own freaking way and put it in front of more people. Right. And part of it, too, is like, not. Boredom's not the right word, maybe comfort, where I'm like, I could just kind of keep doing this. And like, I've been in a routine now where it's like, we've got this type of content, that type of content. You know, ad business will keep growing. We just keep helping people posting stuff on social media every day. Do the newsletter. It is what it is. And I'm just like, I'm just not capable of staying still. So there's also an element of. I think we're helping most of the accountants that are hanging out online, but that's such a small percentage of them. You know, the. The accounts in their 20s and 30s that are stuck in a bad situation who are hanging out online, they're probably finding my stuff, but that's such a microscopic percentage of them. And if you have like a. Like a profound conviction in what. In the value of what you're doing, then you got to get over whatever blockers you have to get that in front of more people, overcome the assumptions of what you think it is to be an accountant, to do what. What it is that you do. The fears of it being slimy yes, there's a slimy version of it. In fact, we talked about this with Justin when. Justin Peterson, when he came on the podcast. The guy that stopped lurking and then started a little side hustler community. Just like chatting with some people in the comments of a podcast here. Former sales guy. And I'm like, man, sales guy coming into accounting. And he's like, if you believe that you have something that will make somebody's lives better, if you believe that you have some. If you believe that you have something that will make somebody's life better, you almost have, like, a personal mandate to put it out into the world, even if it means they got to give you money for it. And that may sound like a justification of a salesperson. Right, but what's the alternative? Like, I don't know. I get, like, there's an element of salesiness about that. But what I am realizing is that is more a problem with me and my own discomfort and insecurities around what I do than it is the world just doesn't work that way. The reality is the world does, like, does work that way. And if I truly believe in what I'm doing, I ought to have the confidence to break through my current capabilities. Define what is going to help me to have a larger impact on the people that I'm trying to help. You can do it. Don't act like you can't. Don't put yourself in a box as an accountant. I think that's a real trap. Thanks for hanging today. I'll see you in the next one.