341 Intuit Stealing Your Clients - A 2024 Guide (Updated!)

The story that has taken over the US Accounting news cycle. Get more from your tax pro and spend less. Spend less. Switch to a TurboTax expert and we'll beat the price you paid your tax pro last season. Oof. Lock in your offer now. Switch to TurboTax Pro now and we will beat the price you paid your tax pro last tax season. Boy, Intuit's not being shy about this. Hey, this is happening in a big way with TurboTax, but it is going to happen everywhere as productized solutions continue to come up market. So let's talk about it. How should we feel about this and how do we protect the war chest? Keep them from stealing your lucky charms. Let's dig in. What do you do when an online provider of the services you sell undercuts you? And this is just a shockingly good example of this from Intuit context for folks not in the U.S. intuit historically was like the advisor first platform under Brad Smith. QuickBooks became like the go to tool for accounting professionals in the US like the word QuickBooks is synonymous with accounting. People don't say show me your bookkeeping file. They say show me your QuickBooks file. And they have like unbelievable market control in the US and the same company now under different leadership, they've always had this consumer tax software, TurboTax that handles like very simple stuff and it's, it's good. It's the like the, the way the vast majority of Americans file their tax returns. But the last couple years they have rolled out like several done for you offerings and will now even do your small business taxes like with a tax professional in the loop. And tax pros are like, get off my lawn. They've got a done for you bookkeeping service now too. That's been a big old controversy because in some situations they will even advertise in the platform. Hey, have into it, do your books. Meanwhile, an actual accountant like that pushes their clients to intuit to QuickBooks is connected to the account. It's super wild. I'm not really going to dig into like, oh, is this should Intuit have done this or not? The reality is if Intuit doesn't do it, somebody's going to do it. And so that name can be anyone. And I'm sure in different markets. This is happening a lot right now. Just today I saw some bookkeeping company that was backed by YC and the landing page is literally just a not very good bookkeeping landing page. And so these solutions are coming like every single day. And AI has kicked off a brand New wave of. Okay, but hang on, hear me out. I think I got a good idea here. What about bookkeeping? But AI? What about tax prep? But AI? Holy. Nobody ever thought of that. I'm sure you'll be the one to nail it. These services are everywhere, right? And oftentimes they've got like super like glossy landing pages and the copy is good. And they're so much better at talking about what they do than we are. And they're full of just really exciting hyperbole. As part of this same campaign, Intuit did this amazing commercial with, I don't know how you say it, Adam Devine, you know who I'm talking about. Super funny. But in this commercial he literally fires his Tax Pro in this just this super savage way to go to TurboTax. And the tax Pro is just like portrayed as just like this total numpty that is just totally taken aghast by this whole thing. And it's just this like real sort of codgerly framing of a professional accountant. Not going to fixate. I don't want to fixate too much on TurboTax and just I want to like talk more generally about how we navigate more services like this, stepping into what we do. But for perspective Today on what TurboTax is doing, you go to this landing page and one of the first things they call out is you can get your taxes done for you by a local expert. Now you're never going to see that person like in person, but they're ticking all the boxes like they're a web based service. But they also acknowledge, okay, people want somebody local. So we'll call that out. Like this is a like full on. We're going to do anything and everything for you, from personal prep to entity prep. So individual prep. Right now there's an assisted version and a full service version. Full service, which is like having a Tax Pro do it for you. Starts at 149 bucks. That's for federal only. That's not too surprising to me. I think like virtually no one probably pays that 149, right? Like that's the starting price. On the business side, I think this is more interesting. TurboTax Live business. You know your small business. We know business taxes. Meet Chris, tax expert. Four years. Oh, normally they go with like 17 years or something. This one's more interesting. So there's an assisted version and then there's a full service version. Full service version, Federal only starts at. Drum roll please. $1,749. Fed only, no states. It starts at that. So I have six thoughts, six tips for how to navigate the coming wave of all sorts of online solutions coming after everything that professional service providers do. Tip number one, it ought to be pretty obvious from what we just talked about, treat this as the new floor of the market. I know a lot of US tax firms. In fact, I would actually hazardous that by like firm count, the majority of US tax firms are doing a whole lot of business returns for less than 1749 Turbo taxes minimum. What does that mean? Is that good news for us? It's probably good news for some of us, but it's also going to require maybe a difficult look in the mirror. Pilot has raised a bunch of money. Different company. Jeff bezos pumped like 100 million into this thing. Their pricing for tax, there's a basic package that starts at 2450 and the standard package starts at 5400 a year. That is more than most firms charge for tax work. Most small firms, that is. So what does this mean for us? You ready for a swift roundhouse kick to the grief bone? Okay, look me in the eyes. Are you better than those services? Number one? Number two, are you really? Number three. Really, really though, Are you better than those services? Do you truly believe that? Number four. I agree, you are better. Then why are you afraid to charge more than them? Why did these nincompoops just come in, start selling the heck out of this service? They say that 6 million people, over 6 million people have switched to TurboTax from a tax professional this year. It said in one of those commercials these nannies are selling business tax, tax work starting at 1750 or 1725, whatever it was. And we are, we believe to our core that we are a superior service because we've seen the work that's come from those things but still can't bring ourselves to charge that something's got to give there, right? You're either worth it or you're not. And if you are truly better, as I believe virtually every provider out there is, then you need to have the confidence to charge what you are worth. Bringing me to number two, second tip. This starts with being able to confidently communicate what you do versus what they do because it is different. These services. You rock up, you talk with somebody who, and like, I don't want to dunk on the, like the tax professionals that are involved in this service and work in the service, many of them, they actually run their own shops and they do this like on a contract basis with Intuit and a sidebar. I actually think Intuit will pull more professionals into the profession with a service like this because they can offer like a flexible setup where people can work from home and develop expertise. And I'm sure Intuit's got pretty good like training, resources. And a lot of those people, after going through that process for a few years, they're probably going to move on and launch their own firm. And that's, that's honestly a good thing for the profession. My most senior technical person, who I brought with me from a past firm, absolute rock star, like top technical person, came from a Jackson Hewitt, which was like a retail sort of setup, literally started doing taxes in a mall. And it's the kind of thing the tax professionals like look down their nose at. Like it's this lesser than thing. But everybody starts somewhere and there's going to be a whole lot of smart people that come through this into the profession. I think that's great. But when the client comes to you and they're like, I just watched the super bowl and I saw a commercial for this service and boy, it looked pretty good, you need to have at the ready. Here's fundamentally what is different about what I do versus what they do. Namely you and I can actually build a relationship in that service. You're going to go and you're going to get a job done. They're going to take out the financial trash and you're never going to see that person again. And if you have issues and you got to circle back, I don't know what kind of support they're going to give you, but it is the difference between working with a call center effectively versus working with someone that's actually going to learn, you learn what you do and, and all that. This episode is sponsored in part by liflow. Big news. Liflow just raised, raised a whole pile of money. A new series A. And you better believe they're gonna pour that into making cool stuff. Liveflow Easy way to connect your accounting ledgers to Excel, to Google Sheets, qbo, Xero, Liberate the data from the accounting ledger. But let me give you some backstory. Since they started in 2021, their mission has always been help businesses manage and understand their finances better. Lifelo was born to help you automate manual work so you can serve more clients, scale your firm efficiently and deliver high value advisory services. And though in this way every everyone wins, we all win. Today they support thousands of firms and businesses. But they are launching Live Flow next, a game changing platform designed to help you and your team become high growth by financial advisory Powerhouses. Whole bunch of new stuff coming there that I'll be telling you more about in the coming weeks. Okay. Lots of fun stuff happening at Live Flow. Check out the 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 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, 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 scene 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, 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's the experience, are they 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 at weak. It's very hard to prove your technical capabilities, your relative technical capabilities to another service. Almost certainly you're coming in punching higher than like a high volume service like this where they, they're hiring folks who are usually early on in that journey. And they usually don't handle the most complex scenarios either. But that's a hard thing to convince clients of. Like what is your relative expertise? It doesn't mean we don't try, but, but oftentimes clients classically are like, well, my stuff's not that hard, it doesn't require that much. Or my friend went through that service and they had good luck. So I'm sure I will too. But just telling them no, I'm better, that's not enough. And we actually went pretty deep on this on a past episode. It's actually episode 264 of the pod. Let's link that one down in the show notes. In fact, I gave an entire spreadsheet you can use as a starting point to be able to confidently communicate with why you're different. And it basically puts all of these productized services on a grid. So think about like software feature comparison things. We've all seen those on landing pages, right? Like tool A versus tool B. And then all the rows are all the different features. You're now a tool in this context and we're going to put you alongside all those other services. And so the rows that I have in this spreadsheet, the price, what does it start at? But what's actually the price for you, the client? Because the fact that it starts at 99 cents doesn't mean that's what you're going to pay. Right? The people, what is the expertise level of the folks doing the work? Availability? Do you get access to a consistent person? For example, QuickBooks, live bookkeeping, like you basically work with like a pool of bookkeepers. You're not going back to the same bookkeeper. Another row I have here, is it your spouse? No, that's a win. That's more in the bookkeeping context because everybody likes to ask their spouse to do the bookkeeping. Tax types supported, Accounting types supported. Do they actually review the accounting before they do the tax work? Is there any advisory that comes along with that? Or planning this spreadsheet, we can link this one in the show notes as well. We put it together for that past episode, but it's got all the, all the different columns of common services, US Pros are compared with and whatever market you're in, there's a version of this where you have online services, you know, doing a version of what you do. But, but it's stuff like Bench, TurboTax, QuickBooks Live Bookkeeping, TurboTax Full Service. Jackson Hewitt like the Walk in Style tax service. Everywhere you look, tax and bookkeeping services are being probably commoditized to a degree, but they're also kind of being cheapened by the marketing efforts of these groups saying we cracked the code. Finally we get, we are proprietary. This and that has made it so this stuff is turnkey. And, and the entrepreneurs on the other side, not all of them, but many of them are like, ah, finally it's about time. Because this has always felt harder than it needed to be. And that's what I mean, that's just what people outside of our space say. Like until you have been through the thick of it, like had to deal with running a complex entity structure, going through an audit or something like that. Like until you have quote unquote earned your stripes as an entrepreneur, I would argue it's hard to like really understand the value of a good advisor. But if we can like confidently present, yeah, that's cool that there is this other service, but they only do this and we do all of these things for you. And here's some examples in the past of where these additional things we do for you really came through importantly. But you'll also see that if you went through this service you would actually pay X thousand dollars. Here's what we charge you. And honestly right now in many cases you going to look pretty darn good like, like a screaming deal when you do that comparison, which you probably don't want to, but being able to confidently make this comparison I think actually will stand in support of more competitive fees for a lot of firms out there. Now, third thought here, if anybody needs to really watch out, it is small firms. Because small firms traditionally when you enter the market, you, you feel like you don't have any market power. And so you come in and as a, as a price leader in order to just get work in the door and we've talked about it before, I think it's a misnomer that you have to start general when you come into a firm. I actually think it's easier to acquire work if you come in and frame yourself as a guru within a specific domain. Be super visible. It's a great way to get attention when otherwise why the heck does anybody care that one more accounting firm just opened Right. Like, what are you bringing to the table that every single other accounting firm with more experience than you can, you can't do better. And if, if you agree with that notion, then your solution is to go cheap. But boy, that's a, that's a hamster wheel that you just don't want to get on. Now, a survey that, that we often point to in the U.S. the National association of Tax Professionals, puts out an annual fee survey and their 2003, the most recent fees survey that we have. Just to put these fees in perspective, the average firm in this study does, let's just say they're small firms. That, that's totally an arbitrary yardstick. But only 19% of the firms surveyed do over 300 grand a year USD in revenue. So by, by most people's yardstick, these are smaller firms, you know, one to three, one to three people, probably the average price of a personal tax return, $248. The average price of a business tax return, $604, nearly 1/3 of the minimum of TurboTax. And so it is easy for me, who, like my background is about a $5 million practice, a team of about 40. We were a little bit up market, trying to get more up market. But it's very easy for me to say, well, you just, you're not, I mean, I really can't help you if you're that far down market. Like, you just, you don't know what you're doing, you're not charging enough. But the reality is, like, everybody is on a journey on the same food chain and you are at where you are at. So it's very easy, I think, for folks at slightly larger firms or who are slightly more upmarket to be like, well, yeah, the problem is, obviously you don't charge enough money, but the money that you can charge is a product largely of your client base and what they're willing to pay. Oftentimes we do undercharge or we do have this like, imposter syndrome that prevents us from, from going out and trying to serve maybe a more premium type of client. But if the average Firm is charging $604 for a business tax return and then a productized solution, the biggest one in the market by a mile, comes out and says, yeah, we're actually going to start at 1750. What does that mean? What does that mean for, what does that mean specifically for small firms? Maybe that, I don't know, maybe that's great news, actually. Maybe, maybe that's the best thing that ever happened for small firms. And it actually just propped up the bottom of the market. But I tell you what, I would be thinking about this and taking all of this very seriously. A lot of firms in the last few years since COVID really have been really aggressively increasing prices. And there's a lot of like, clients out there that have bounced around and are bent out of shape about all this. And it's probably a product of not keeping up with the complexities that have come in the past. But for whatever reason, this might have just been like a golden egg into it, just dropped in your lap. And for us in the US this is into it. But I have a suspicion that a version of this is happening everywhere around the world. And AI is like pouring gasoline on this fire. You have these highly productized solutions saying, we've automated this thing that used to be really hard. And most of the time it's not going to be a great experience, but notably it's going to be a very different experience than what working with you looks like in ways that buyers don't understand. And so we can help them understand here's exactly what they do. Here's, here's exactly what we do. And in some cases, like if you're a firm, this may be why we're going to charge you twice as much this year. And if you don't like that, let me walk you right over here to TurboTax. I'll see you next year. Now, thought number four, this is only going to continue to get worse. For general solution providers, AI and all technological development, it always comes up and solves the general solutions first. It's like how ChatGPT is smarter than any friend that you have while simultaneously not being as smart as any friends that you have. Like in their actual expertise, like in your domain of expertise, you're still smarter than ChatGPT. But what makes it novel is that it's pretty good at like everything else. And when it isn't, it's very good at tricking you into thinking that it is. But that's an example of a really good general solution, a shockingly good general solution. And that's just how these things develop. These productized solutions come up. They solve the simple use cases, very broad brushstrokes approach. And like it or not, like if you run a general practice, like that's, that's, that's always going to be the practice. That is kind of in the crosshairs of general solutions coming up market. Now, thought number five, it's worth just doing the mental exercise. Consider a future where Solution providers do take over in like a really extreme way. Like what would that even look like if, if they did, you know, 4x the market share, these productized solutions relative to small accounting firms. I think it's probably going to happen to a large degree equally because they're coming up market and probably getting better over time, but also because the number of accountants is just going off a cliff and there's not enough professional firms to serve all the people who need help. So I do think the product solutions are going to grow really, really fast. But if they can come way up market, let's say they're doing, you know, tax work clear up to, you know, 10 grand for, for a business tax return. Let's say they come way up market from where they are today and they're by and large delivering service the same way they are today in a highly automated way. That is just a worthwhile mental exercise to go through. Because you think about what the, what the pain points would be then if they are coming up market. We talked about running a general firm, you know, TurboTax coming up market. They're not coming up market saying, here's TurboTax for beekeepers, here's TurboTax for taxidermists. They're saying, hey, we got all these templates. We're going to, we're going to pack your numbers straight into these templates and shoot that thing out the door as quickly as we can. Because it is, it's fundamentally just a volume model, right? You start thinking about, well, what are the adjacent services that we do that these things don't really wade into? For my bookkeeping practice, that was bill pay, that was cash planning, that was payroll and hr. That was some more like custom sort of vertical, specific stuff that we would do for clients if, if a productized service can come along and do the core thing of, say, bookkeeping, but the value of what we provide to the client is ultimately deliver, delivered by the like collective value of all those adjacent things that we do as well, then the premium on those adjacent things continues to go up. And I would argue this has already been the case as groups have been trying to commoditize bookkeeping for the last five or ten years. Ultimately, in my practice, I didn't have a great way to make very much money on quote, unquote, bookkeeping. What we made money on was more like controllership with just a little bit of advisory, nothing too crazy, but like a little bit of a sort of controllership angle on the business as a whole. A little more of an accounting department in a box. And it was that framing that let me go to clients and say, you could hire a person and a half for this, you could hire $150,000 your controller for this, or you basically get our fractional controller support and you're going to pay us like you would, you know, one and a half FTEs. But that's a very different proposition than saying we're going to come to your bookkeeping. Because right or wrong, like quote unquote, standalone bookkeeping in a vacuum continues to be like devalued over time. Today's episode is sponsored in part by cloud accountant staffing. They're going to help you find super talented accountants in the Philippines come work for you. Biggest thing I learned in the process of hiring Filipino accounts to come work for my firm, about about half of the last 10 hires I made were in the Philippines when I was running my firm. Biggest thing you learn, they are completely normal people with families and lives and are incredibly capable and multiple. And they can pretty much do anything your onshore team can do. I don't know why that is. And there's something about it that is uniquely American. We oftentimes we associate offshore work with like junior level stuff, entry level stuff, probably because support calls and stuff like that go offshore, but boy did we have people doing technical stuff. So I'm just going to show you this resume. There's a real resume. The one of cloud accountant staffing's recruiters in the Philippines were able to bring to a firm. This guy got his bachelor's in accounting three years ago and spending the last few years doing US Tax prep Pro Connect Tax online. You use that RC reports Core V. What is this guy? Sponsored by Jason Daily 1040, 1065, 1120s, 1120. Man, this is the sort of resume where if it came across your desk and it was an onshore person, you would be like, please come to my office stat. And we will have talks. And there's a growing ecosystem of super talented folks in the Philippines because there's so many firms hiring over there now, not just small firms. You've got, I mean big, foreign, regional. I mean you've got tens of thousands of people in the Philippines that work for giant firms. But that is all feeding into there being an ecosystem of super talented accountants over there that are all going through the same things that onshore ones are. They want a better lifestyle, they want flexibility, they want a lot of the things that small firms can offer. A cloud accountant staffing can help you find some good Ones Learn more Check out the link down the show Notes this episode is sponsored in part by Corv Gang. You want a tax firm? Can you hear it? Can. Can you hear me? Can you hear the end of the year coming? Choo choo, Big boy's gonna be here before you even know it. And I know that you are still tired from the deadline, you're still in the thick of another deadline, but you know what's about to come up and punch you right in the mouth. Oh, about, about six weeks after the deadline there where you're like, everything is good, nothing is ruined. I probably have to make some software changes, but it is chill mode. Then you gotta start Christmas shopping. Then you're into that whole thing and before you know it, you're straight back into January 1st. Well, if you do that, gang, what you're going to miss out on is the biggest opportunity in building a profitable tax practice. And that is tax planning slash advisory. We used to call it tax planning, seems like the cool kids call it advisory. Now you can charge top dollar for this stuff. And the way you charge top dollar is by demonstrating the value to accountants. To me, truly, right now the easiest platform to do this with is Corvi generates reports that show like tax deferral, like visualize things in a way that the client can actually understand to where Even if I was doing honestly the exact same work in my tax software, the platform to me is worthwhile simply to sell the engagement. And the way I would do this is actually a bunch of like doing like half of a planning engagement for a bunch of clients, estimating the savings of us following through with the engagement, putting that in front of them. And for this I'm usually charging at least 2x what I charge for prep. So it ought to at least 3x the annual engagement. On a whole, it is not any more work than the prep is. In fact it makes the prep way easier because we're doing some more work upfront. Those got the benefit that they're paying in tax by year end. So it takes the pressure off of busy season. I only let companies sponsor my content that I would actually be a user of. We turn most of them away. Corby. That's how I would be getting my tax advisor to work done. It's not the cheapest tool to get started. If you got sticker shock with Core V, I would say it's because we're not charging enough for tax advisory work sort of thing that like your first two or three engagements ought to cover the cost of for the rest of the year. Learn more about Core V, check out the link down in the show notes. And so what things start like coming at a premium in this future timeline where solution providers do come way up market and we should just plan on them coming up market quite a bit. And I think AI will actually accelerate this because there are legitimately cool applications of AI that these companies will develop that you and I won't have access to. At the same time. Our professional tools will get better and so we're going to be getting more efficient in many of the same ways that these productized solutions will be getting more efficient. Yet another reason to be investing in the tools specific to our space because you could see a timeline there where, where our tools don't keep up and we're at a real disadvantage. I'm not too concerned of that happening. But as they come up like what is. What is to me the main thing that remains even if AI comes in and truly automates, let's say, let's say GPT5 comes out. And like the language models we have right now are capable of unbelievably novel things where you just throw them a few details. Like when GPT4 came out in March of 2023, the morning it came out. And if you remember, OpenAI did a developer livestream and their one more thing at the end of this announcement livestream was we're going to prepare Becky's taxes. And they did this little example where they said, you're now tax GPT. You're going to calculate Becky's taxes. And everybody's like, holy what? And about an hour before that I had gotten access to it and I put on Twitter like, hey, this was, this was March of last year. I was like, hey, what should we throw at it? And somebody jokingly is like, well, I'm doing extension calculations right now. Maybe you can run an extension estimate estimate for me. And so I plugged a hypothetical thing in there. I said like $120,000 W2.2 dependent kids withholdings or this or that, like a, a basic, like a 1040 easy. A postcard tax return basically. I think I may have even had some itemized deductions in there. I chucked it in there. I gave a very convincing response. And this is less than 90 minutes from when we got our hands on GPT4 when the model just dropped less than 90 minutes. So nobody knows what I can do. I put it out on Twitter. I said can somebody double check the numbers on this extension estimate for me? I still remember the response from Earnest. Earnest, you still around? Drop a comment from Earnest. Matches my calculations to the dollar. Are you kidding me? This let's be real about what language models are. These things generate a token at a time of text based on probability of according to all the stuff that came before. They literally generate chunks of words one at a time, probabilistically, just based on all the words that came before it. What this thing can do tax calculations. Now, obviously it's not putting numbers on forms. It gets stuff wrong a lot. It can only do so complex of things. That was where we were last March. So let's just say GPT5 comes out, you plug some information in, machine goes brrrr. Goes out and grabs the form and it like actually does tax work. Seems unlikely, but let's just say it did. And three years from now, AI is largely doing all the work that like we are doing in terms of putting together forms, classifying transactions, ensuring the accounting is correct. We just saw with the new Model 01 the other day, it's a terrific, like initial review of a balance sheet. Well, only what the AI can't do, and that is have a relationship with another human being that understands what you're doing and what you're going through and can give you personalized advice. Now, can an AI do versions of that? Yes. But you know what's really interesting about having gotten our hands on ChatGPT advanced voice already, and it's unbelievably human and engaging and it laughs and it thinks your jokes are funny and it can whisper and it can talk like an Australian. All these really fun things that I can't do, we're already seeing. Wow, that's really cool and novel, but I mean, ultimately not a replacement for a conversation with an actual person. Now, there's all sorts of situations where conversations with other human beings may not be possible or practical, like, you know, companionship for the elderly, like all these different situations where it's a whole lot better than nothing. But when it comes to entrepreneurs running their business, aren't you still going to want to be able to hang with other entrepreneurs? Aren't you still going to be able to want to pick somebody's brain? If there's a guru that works with a bunch of bookkeepers and sees what works and what doesn't work, even if it's as simple as what's the best AI model to use, isn't that person still going to have value? I think so. And honestly, the only situation where it doesn't AI is probably wiped out. I mean just about all knowledge works. So like the entire world looks different at that point. But to take 65 steps back from that apocalypse scenario, which honestly might not be bad. Like I still hold out Star Trek the Next Generation as like the ultimate future timeline. Like things on Earth are good, man. Like occasionally you get like some Romulans buzzing by or something like that and it creates a scare for a bit. But man, they got things figured out. Like Earth is super chill, people seem to be farmers by and large. I still have a really hard time believing that we don't just find more work to do. Like the Industrial revolution, you know, having electricity in every building. Like all sorts of old articles about like, oh, we can work four hour weeks now, but the human condition seems to like just keep putting us on a new hamster wheel. So it seems exceedingly likely to me that we'll just find more stuff to do. It is the American way after all. But what we honestly probably know is going to happen in the next one to three years is these product sized solutions will just keep coming up market a step at a time and we're going to have to be able to confidently navigate that and have conversations with clients about what we do and why it's different. Now those solutions may shift the market. And this, this might actually be like the first time that a service at least in the US has gotten so in your face about what they do and how much it costs that you're like, well shoot, if everybody's going to see this, maybe they did actually just have an impact on how I price things and how I do my work. And for most small firms in this case that's probably gonna be a positive impact. But it's worth focusing on what you ultimately control, have control over. And that is the specificity of the people you serve or the lack thereof. Just having an awareness that these solutions will always, or at least in the near term will be general solutions. That it puts a greater premium on the peripheral services that you can provide. And these have always been more valuable. Even tax work like tax advisory is more valuable than tax work. Bill pay, cash management, that is more valuable than bookkeeping. But this continues to put a greater emphasis on the value of adjacent services, solving actual pains for that entrepreneur rather than just doing a job like bookkeeping. I would say there's actually a version of this here where it's going to make a difference how you yourself lean into AI tools. We've talked about Jason Bot, like the clone we have made, trained on all of the episodes of this podcast, all things being equal, of two advisors are selling the same service and one gives you access to a 24, 7 around the clock AI assistant that can handle 50% of client questions. That's a better service, I would say. So how we lean into these tools probably matters, but ultimately how much we are leaning into like the human aspect of working with other entrepreneurs, that has got to be the number, number one thing. And you know, the sad thing is when you get really, really busy, what is the very first thing that falls off the table? It is relationship management. You are so mired in doing the work that managing those relationships is a frustrating afterthought. That is the status check in. How irritating is that? Having to manage the relationship is this annoyance when the future of what everything is is relationship management and arguably what it ought to be today. Right? Let's not conflate they will always need me with. They will always need me to set up my computer and key in information and do manual tasks. We do a lot of that right now. A lot of taking data from A to B, keying it into this and that. Let's not confuse the fact that we believe in our core. No, I'm sure, I'm pretty sure my client will always need me with. They will always need me sitting in a chair and doing data entry. Now, what your client needs from you is you, is your advice. That relationship, I'm pretty sure they will still need that. But what they definitely don't need is a lot of the stuff that I think tech's probably gonna solve for sooner than later. I'm curious to know if there is a solution, be it TurboTax or something else in a different market that is maybe putting pressure on the way that you deliver your services. What are you doing about it? Is it causing you to change your pricing to maybe train your team on how to talk about these things? Anything like that. I'd be super interested to hear that other podcast that we did about how you communicate how you deliver your service. Link that down in the show notes. If you got a team, they're going to be handing handling versions of this conversation. It could very well be worth sharing that podcast with them. Just to say, this is something that we need to going into next year and renewals and all that, be able to very confidently speak to this is what that service does. This is what we do. If your clients don't know the difference, that's kind of a bummer. But if that's where you're at, that's where you're at because it's something we're probably going to be dealing with more going forward. Thanks for coming and hanging today. I'll see you in the next one.