342 13 Tips to Select Better Accounting Firm Tech

Okay. Been thinking a lot lately about how to better approach tech change management and accounting firms as we're pushing out this big project around how to pick a better practice management system. And it's kind of got me back to the fundamentals of what were the biggest mistakes that I made, the biggest mistakes I still see most firms making. And how do you meaningfully keep your firm progressing from a tech standpoint without being burning out your people along the process? So many of us, the visionaries who are probably more the folks that listen to this podcast because you're the only ones that can get by without being overwhelmed by it, we have all these things that we wanna do and we're perpetually frustrated by how quickly you can steer that ship or how quickly you can get people excited for that change. I learned a ton of lessons here on the right and wrong ways to do this. Gonna share a bunch of ideas, 13 tips here for how to prepare yourself for a better 2025 that doesn't burn out your team by making the wrong tech choices. So let's do it. Let's talk tech. Okay. Let's dig right in. We got a lot of ground to cover. Number one, don't spring this on your team. Don't surprise your team with this. They gotta understand the plan. It's not enough to like, kick down the door and be like, we're doing this. And sometimes you may be on the inside feeling that, like, you're so convicted about a change that nobody's going to be able to talk you out of it. And so you kick that door down and you just try to come through with this degree of force. That should make clear that I'm not interested in being talked out of this. You know, I've definitely made this mistake before where, like, I was just so convicted, where I'm like, okay, this is what we're doing. You're either with me or you're not with me. But that can ultimately be really exhausting for your team. Even if you, you're not in a mood to be talked out of this, at least help them to understand the bigger picture. You have slotted this change in amongst a bunch of other changes that could have potentially been made. You're prioritizing this within this timeframe. Help them to understand the why. And if possible, those team members who are a little more change averse, they just don't like living amidst unknown. And if they're worried it's gonna be a new thing every day, every week, every month, is there an olive branch that you can extend there to say I wanna explore this. I wann change the trade off being we're going to stick with this for a certain time frame. Especially with your core systems, you can only change them so often. So sit down, map out that timeline with your team. Say with all the other responsibilities we have in the annual cycle, here's where I want to slot it in. And make sure that you're not biting off more than is realistic. Like make sure you're not changing too many things at the same time. It's an easy mistake to make. And in my experience, whenever we tried to change, there were a few situations where we just had to rip a whole bunch of band aids off. Like bought some old partners out, just had to really like change a bunch of stuff, kind of tear up the carpet. And there will be situations like that. But in a perfect world, you're not changing a whole bunch of things at the same time because the cumulative effect of that on your team, like it's just really challenging. And it's also hard to do more than one thing well at a time. Like, you want to make the most of this, do it the right way. Apps have gotten so complex these days that you can use them but still not get the most out of them. But we want to get the very most we can out of this thing that we're implementing. So try to do it in as distraction, free of a way as possible. Just don't burn them out. Especially as you're heading into the new year, you want people on your team, you don't want them going into your busiest season feeling exhausted. Okay, Tip number two may go without saying, make the right picks. Okay? And we're going to talk about how to do that. And it's balancing act here because we like to. I mean, we love to overanalyze things and then not make a decision, which is the worst thing that we can do because it defers that learning. But don't get lazy about decisions. I have gotten lazy about decisions. I've seen a landing page, I've had a conversation with someone and I'm like, yep, this is what it is. Let's just get it over with. Like let's just, let's just go. There's a balancing act there of getting lazy and knowing that you need to just go to something better versus like pumping the brakes too much. Which leads me to tip number three, acknowledging that the price of wrong picks, it's overwhelming burnout for your team. It's not just the cost of time and money of Making the wrong selection in my case. I've shared with you the story before of picking the wrong practice management system that cost us like three years of productivity. The real cost there was just how we absolutely ran the team ragged going through that change process and then having to change again after that was so brutal. We tried to do it right the first time, but big long onboarding and everybody was involved in every training. We spent so much time on this. But ultimately the biggest price for us of getting it wrong was the overwhelm of the team. They were so over having to change stuff going forward. So then when we changed again, we get to the other side of that and they're like, don't you dare, don't you dare bring some other change to me. Because like, they just weren't having it. So tip number four, to round that out. I love new tech as much as the next guy, but I am all about less change by finding a way to make better change. Finding better changes. Does that make sense? The better the information you have, the less changes you have to make. So number five, we get into kind of the strategy of how you build a stack and then we get into how you make better decisions. So number five, it always has to start with your core systems. I've talked to a lot of firms who are afraid to like pull up the carpet on that core system, even though it's not quite the right system. And they try to fix it by sticking a bunch of powerful tools around it to sort of shore up what it lacks. And this honestly gets you into an even worse situation, probably because the backbone of your firm, usually the practice management system, isn't doing what you need it to do. And so you pick up a bunch of overpowered adjacent tools to support that practice management system and what it lacks. But in doing so, sort of trap yourself long term with that half baked PM because you've built all this other stuff around it. Now the notion of going to a better pm, which is the most important change decision that you can make, the notion of going to that better PM gets harder because you have so much adjacent tech around it and that you would then change because a more capable PM probably takes on some of the things that that adjacent tech does. So we aren't looking for band aids, like don't start with band aids again. We talked about agreeing to a change cycle for core systems. If there's an argument for band aids, it is that we change this thing. And you know, we kind of made a deal with the team. We're not going to cycle out another PM for five years at a minimum. That's a scenario where maybe you look at Band Aid, Band Aid Solutions, but where you don't want to end up is putting band aids on a system for a decade that is just an inferior system because with every band aid that you put on, it gets harder to pull that out and put the right one in. Now, there was a time maybe five to seven years ago, where the cloud practice management space was changing so fast that you didn't quite know what you could trust or whether something was good enough to run your whole firm on it. We are so far past that. We have really big, really successful, and when I say really big, you know, 100 to 200 employee firms running on cloud practice management systems successfully. It's not a question of can it do what I need it to do, It's a question of is it the best one for me? And what I need, that's really what it comes down to, is which one is the best for me. And the last 24 months, the transparency and availability of information around almost all software in our space has gotten so much better. Still a long ways to go, but we now have so much more information at our fingertips and so much easier access to other professionals than we ever had before with which to make better decisions that you just gotta figure out what is the right one. For me, it's not going to be perfect, but that core system, I gotta nail it. That's extremely important. I still talk with people, obviously. I'm a big proponent of accountant communities, not only because I have one, but because I've pushed the heck out of everyone else that's building communities because it's just so, so powerful. And there's still accountants out there that are like, that account community is expensive. It's like, no, you know, what's really, really expensive is wasting years making the wrong decisions. Wasting years making decisions based on, you know, what a salesperson tells you rather than what a peer can tell you in a really contextual way. Those are like the most valuable aspects of access to peers to me, is when it comes to making really big decisions, like choosing a practice management system. Somebody gave me the straight story. Not someone who the software platform will connect me with as like an approved referral. Right? Like, that's not a real person. Give me the real story of someone who's gone through this transition recently. The more similar they are to me, the better. That is how you make a really high quality decision on those, those core systems in your firm. 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 going to pour that into making cool stuff LifeFlow. Easy way to connect your accounting ledgers to Excel to Google Sheets QBO0 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. LifeFlow was born to help you automate manual work so you can serve more clients, scale your firm efficiently and deliver high value advisory services. In this way, 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 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 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. I. But I would still be hiring Offshore Air 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, 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 tip number six. If it's a peripheral system, like something that's not the practice management system, start the process on those a little differently with isolated tests. So practice management system, you're gonna, you're gonna wanna do some tests anyways to validate, like yes, this is the right one for me. But when you switch practice management systems, you go all in these peripheral systems on the other hand, like say it's a new tax workflow tool or a tax planning tool or you know, uncategorized expense tool or something like that. Maybe receipt management. The way to start with that is always going to be a test probably with some of your team members who have a greater appetite for change. And if you've got a whole team right now, that is change averse. Let me just tell you. You make two or three hires of people who are energized by change and it completely changes your world when you feel like you got to put the whole team on your back for all the enthusiasm and like all of the, the energy that's required for one of those change, one of those changes. As soon as you can pull a few people in who can reflect that and also have that energy. Energy, oh my gosh, it makes your life so much easier. So if you're super stuck on this right now, there's definitely like a culture thing there where getting the right people in can make this easier on you. Anyways, if this is a peripheral system, a non core system, start with the people on your team who aren't going to be burnt out. In fact, they're hopefully going to be excited by the notion of trying a new approach and get some really, really clear wins there, so that when you do take it to the rest of the team, it's already been validated. They're learning from people within your team, not some outsider from a software platform whose interests, like, don't align with your own. But also you're going to de risk potentially getting that change wrong so that if it does go sideways, it's not going to weigh on the folks within your firm who are most susceptible to being burned out by change. So for peripheral systems, don't throw it on them. That's not the way to start. Start with an isolated test until you've absolutely validated what you think that's going to do for you. Tip number seven, Be mindful of overlap. Since there's a growing number of tools that want to be anything and everything, really frustratingly, especially around stuff like client portals proposals. Like there's, there's so many, so many different types of tools now trying to do the same things. And it's because certain aspects of what these tools do are really, really sticky. Practice management tools started with like, task management, and then they realized, oh, if a firm trains their client on our interface, that's actually like five times harder to change than just your own workflow. Like, I would change my internal workflow, no problem. But if it means I have to retrain all of my clients on a new thing, that's an entirely different prospect. So everybody started building in like a client portal aspect of their solution because it adds a bunch of stickiness. Problem is then you got six different client portals, you're confusing your clients and, and you really just want that all in one. So watch out for unnecessary overlap where you're ultimately paying for the same thing in several places. In many ways these days, it's almost like it is unavoidable, like you're going to have some overlap. But the even worse thing here is actually mediocre overlap where maybe your PM doesn't do proposals very well or your PM doesn't have a very good portal. And then you've got this other, like, workflow Apple, that also doesn't do proposals or portal very well. So you got like two things that do it in kind of a bad way. And this is where really contextual advice is helpful. You may have, you may talk with another firm for whom the strengths of a PM or, or some tool perfectly fit into the weaknesses of their current stack. And when they pick that tool up, they're, they're going to absolutely love it because it was everything that they were missing. But if your stack looks different like those jigsaw puzzles don't fit together quite the same way. So this probably goes without saying, but like the stack, how those things work together is very, very important. And it's worth, when you talk to another firm owner, trying to contextualize their advice as much as you can so that you can understand where they were at. And what about that switch made it a great switch for them to ensure that that same logic is going to hold up in your case. That's a really hard problem. Managing that overlap as, as tools, it's like they, there's a number of examples of this in this, in our space, but they do one thing really, really well and then frustratingly, they still have to grow from there and so they start doing more things and you're like, no, no, no. I just wanted you for this one super like simple thing that you do well. Can you please just stick with that? I already have this other tool for that thing and I actually tell software people this a lot. Like, it's not enough to sell somebody on the value of your offering in a vacuum. You can have a really cool thing, but the first thing, the first place art minds go is where that bumps up into all the other tools that I use. It can be a cool solution, but it doesn't. If it doesn't fit in with all the other tools that I use, I can't use it. And there's so much overlap right now. This is like we've got this like log jam problem that's really frustrating and seemingly just getting worse as these tools try to do more and more things. Okay, tip number eight. Don't let landing pages fool you. There's a company out there that I don't want to dunk on anybody, let's just say, especially early stage companies. This is very, this is true of a lot of early stage companies right now. They could put up some super cool landing pages and that landing page can get you so hyped. But a landing page doesn't mean anything. And oftentimes before they'll even put a product in your hands, they'll put up a landing page that's super impressive and you will like hedge your future on this. There's so many examples of. And maybe this is actually a equally big point kind of zooming out. But you will, you will hear like the tax software vendors, for example, they've been saying for years, this platform or that platform, yeah, we're investing a lot in it right now. It's going to be there in two or three years. And you're like, okay, I'll, I'll burn two or three years of productivity on this inferior system because you say this other thing's going to get there in that period of time. That's an awful way to make buying decisions because in most cases there's already a tool that's there today that you could be picking up. And you know where that tool's going to be two or three years from now, probably ahead of the vendor who's two or three years behind today. Right. So never buy something based on future promise, but also don't buy based on landing pages. They, they hold much, far too much weight probably in our buying decisions. Number nine, please validate what salespeople say. I would. I mean, I think 90 plus percent of firms are still making decisions based on what salespeople say because they don't know any other people who run firms because they don't talk or collaborate with other firm runners at all. So how else are they going to make these decisions? And it is a hard problem, like how do I get real truthful, transparent information about this? And people will go to, I mean, for goodness sakes, people go to accounting conventions to learn what kind of software to buy, where the only vendors turning up there are ones with big enough marketing budgets to buy a booth. And then two, when you get there, you're talking with salespeople who are all just incentivized to close X number of deals while they're at that conference. That's literally the entire reason that they're there. Yet we go to that conference thinking, oh, I'm, I'm gonna, I'm gonna unlock some like independent helpful information here. Like you're just not, they're salespeople. What you may unlock is like making a couple friends, meeting accounting firms, learning what's working for them, what's not working for them. Now I like, I'll be the first one to tell you. The expo hall is my favorite part of any accounting conference. If I'm going to be at an accounting conference, and you're gonna be there too, 95% of the time, I'm gonna be in the expo hall. Cause it's just fun and we can geek out on software and all that, but never expect the salesperson to be your friend. They're literally salespeople. And so the alternative is to lean into social proof is to ultimately make buying decisions based on what independent people will tell you. Even digging into, like figuring out who is independent is increasingly tricky. I mean, a huge, almost all of influencer Businesses are built on affiliate revenue, especially in verticals like ours where you don't make money doing what I do from, like, YouTube monetization. Like, the only way you can make a meaningful amount of money on that is like a mainstream channel that does loads, you know, 100 times as much traffic as any of my content could ever do. And so you make your money through affiliate and through brand deals. And so for most creators, they're going out, they're doing influencer marketing. Traditional programs like that, that ultimately associate, like, new contracts, new deals back to them, and they get some sort of incentive there. Accountant communities, a pretty big percentage of accountant communities have partnerships with their preferred vendors. And. And you better believe there's a deal there and it's like a legitimate way of making money. And I wouldn't even go as far as to say that's bad as much as it is inherently not independent. Now, we've tried to tow this line as fairly as we could. And so to me, sponsorship always felt more transparent than affiliates because, you know, anytime there's any monetary transaction that happens between me and a brand, there's ad music blaring. I'm probably being incredibly silly, but it's all above board. Like, you see it and you see where it's happening, right? To me, that's better than an affiliate link. Or, like, not. Not totally understanding the deal that's going on behind the scenes. You still pick that apart and say you're, you're biased because of sponsorships. And there is probably, I mean, there is like, inherent bias. And sponsorships, we do, like, outbound sponsorships where if it's a company we recommend, we will ask them to sponsor our content. But I'd be lying, like, if they're. If. I mean, I couldn't tell you no, because they give you money that doesn't factor in. Like, I tell myself that it doesn't. And we make decisions independent of all of that, but the reality is somebody's giving you money. 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 a 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. Been spent 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 they'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 like cloud accountant staffing can help you find some good ones. Learn more Check out the link down in the show notes this episode is sponsored in part by Corv Gang. You run a tax firm. Can you hear it? 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 accounts. 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. They also got the benefit that they're paying in tax by year end. So it takes the pressure off a 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 advisory 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 you're not charged 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. So I like to think what we're doing here is as independent as it gets. Maybe with the exception of just like somebody, you know, that is running a firm that's really, really helpful. The problem is most of us don't have humongous networks to be able to go out and ask 100 people for advice. Right? But that doesn't mean you can't try. Which leads me into tip number 11. Go out into the world and shout at the top of your lungs. Is anyone having success with this thing? Ask, drop a comment, post on social media, reply on somebody else's thread. I'm thinking about doing this or that. Has anybody done this? Any advice? Accountants are very quick to share advice on on all sorts of things. Sometimes in helpful ways, other times in ways that are like bro, chill out. But like you literally have nothing to lose by asking. You just get more information from other folks sharing their stories. And it is worth thinking about how can I strategically have access to more people, like being visible on social media, engaging in Accountant communities, not being a lurker, like a lot of the things that we talk about, these will all aid you in making very big, very important decisions with the best information possible. Last 2 Somewhat related tip number 12 don't fall in love with integrations. Integrations matter, but integrations are not more important than than the fundamental value of the platform itself. And this is where tax vendors try to trick people. They say, well, this is the only system that integrates with xyz. Every software system has an integrations landing page where they make a list of everything that could even be vaguely perceived as an integration. And you see that, and when you see your tools, you see yourself in that and you think, oh, okay, that makes this the tool for me. It's the same reason why I think the best pricing page for the accounting firm actually shows client avatars, that it's like, oh, it's an E Comm business that sells this and it's this revenue range so that when a client comes, they see that and they're like, oh, that's me. This is the one for me. That's what integration pages do. And they work well, too well. Because what's most important is, does that core platform do what it needs to do? I don't like moving data from A to B any, like, any more than the next guy. But this gets me to my Last tip number 13. You can still systematize what doesn't integrate. There's so many examples of this in our business where we're annoyed that we can't automatically sync a thing from A to B. That is not a hard thing for a human to do. Will they make mistakes? Yes. Do I wish it would magically go from A to B? Yes. But you can hire humans to do repeatable tasks. But what we often do instead is we get annoyed that it isn't automatable and then we have no system as a result. I've been guilty of this so many times where you try to automate it, you fail, you leave the project and then there's no system. It doesn't happen. It doesn't happen consistently. It is not hard to hire humans to do repeatable tasks. That is a thing that can be done. Ultimately, the most important thing when it comes to making a decision about a software platform is, is the, is this the best tool for the job? It still matters how it integrates with your other tools. But I would argue not as much as we historically have thought. I mean, there was this like the cloud era, everything was supposed to perfectly talk with Each other. And all of our data was supposed to flow back and forth between these systems seamlessly, right? Absolutely. Never happened, never will. Integrations became big business. You have companies who don't like each other that won't integrate with each other. It became political. It's just a really frustrating thing. But if there's only, quote, one tool that integrates with the other tool that you use, I'm less concerned with that fact than I am, okay, if I need this, if I need the job done that this other tool does, what is the best tool for that job? Integrations are a factor, but oftentimes too big of a factor or a bigger factor than they should be. I made a lot of meandering tech decisions in my firm. I'm a. I'm a visionary, as you know, so I can. It's very easy for me to overwhelm people. But I made the mistake of putting those changes and talking about those changes too much in front of too many people, rather than having a crack squad of folks who could handle change that were like the testers and the validators of that, almost like the filter between me and the rest of the team who I'm just going to overwhelm. But a lot of those decisions came from a place of not having good information, not having access to people who could help me make that decision. I was 100% the guy who was like, no, I'm going to figure out my own way to do this. And there's for sure a some snowflakes out there who are going to find their own way to do it that's better. But what's it going to cost you along the way in terms of the time to find it, the time to do it yourself. Anytime there's somebody further along the journey than you that is using a specific system or has kind of gone around and landed on a specific system. When you hear a story like that, it's very easy to be like, no, I've got something figured out that they don't. It's very easy for us to do that, and sometimes that is the case. But more frequently, they have a body of experience that we haven't had yet, and we think that our thing is different. Everybody does this. Right? Our clients do it too. You think, no, my. My situation is different than everybody else's. And that's why we have to go do this and figure it out for ourselves. When there's so much time and energy to be saved by following the folks who you look up to who are clearly running successful firms. I spent a lot of years making it harder than it needed to be. You look at, like, Ryan Lazanis's future firm community, where he's like. He's got sort of these sort of turnkey ways. Like, here is how you build a calm firm to a million dollars. And you're like, no, I'm not going to do that. I want to find my own way. And you could spend a decade working on that. And oftentimes what you're going to circle back to is 80% of what he could have told you on day one. And even if you are convicted that you know the right way to do it, your right way to do it is going to be made better by. By learning other people's right ways to do it. Right? The more you can consume, the better. Don't close your eyes and say, no, I gotta figure this out for myself. Cause that's gonna cost you years. Look at what the successful people around you are doing. The really successful ones. The ones who are willing to be transparent and real and not just signal about like, oh, look at how cool my thing is. But build some relationships to have those real conversations. Cause that's gonna accelerate your journey in, like, such an amazing way. It absolutely has mine. Any tips? You got? Anything that we missed? Pop it down in the comments. Thanks for coming and hanging out today. Got a few months left to make some big tech decisions before we get to the new year. I think most of us are dealing with that right now. I'll see you in the next one.