343 My Secret To Strategic Delegation

It goes without saying, delegation is about, is about what you're willing to give up, right? But in my experience, the hardest things for me to delegate were the things that I was unwilling to become ignorant of. Like my identity was tied up within my capability of doing these things. And I knew that the next thing I wanted to get to required me to care a little less about how much of an expert I was in that past thing. But that challenge with the identity, or the ambiguity of the identity of what I would next be when cutting out what I already was, that ended up being a big blocker keeping me from delegating the things that needed to move on in my firm. I want to share today with you six stories of where becoming out of touch, being willing to do that, helped me take a big step. Let's do it. Come on in. Example number one, my firm went through a bunch of tech changes. I bought out a couple old partners and it was, it was like a legacy firm through and through. You had to go through all that, all that change that you would expect with an old timey firm. And I got it, I got it wrong. All sorts of different creative ways. But one thing I ultimately gave myself permission to do was not have to be tied up in the final decision of the direction we went, of the tool that we picked. Oftentimes how this would work is I would pare it down to like two or three options and I would do that based on what I was seeing in the market, based on the bigger kind of direction that I wanted to be pulling the firm, like for example, to cloud based software, that sort of thing. But I would sooner pull in members of the team to go really deep on these tools and what made them different and unique and ultimately make the decision of how that would best support where we wanted to take our firm. And by putting the decision making into their hands, I got much greater buy in in the process. They approached this more as, as an opportunity than something that was being forced upon them. But because I removed myself from that process, I wasn't the expert. And the first time I did this, it was really hard. And I don't know if this is an everybody thing. I gotta think this is an everybody thing to a degree. You're ingrained with this notion that you can do this better than anybody else in your firm. And maybe that's because traditionally you are the alpha and you can do all the technical things better than the folks that you hire. But as most of us are willing to acknowledge, like, the path to growth is getting over that and being willing to pull people in who are better than you at things. Otherwise, the business itself just becomes a reflection of your own limitations, which kind of like gives up the very best aspects of running a business where it's a collective of really smart people that's. That is capable of more than the sum of its parts. But I was willing to have a level of ignorance about the tool that we were going into because I believed that it would lead to a better outcome for the team, it would involve everyone more. For the business as a whole, it was better. And on the other side of that, I also didn't position myself to be the guru, the one that everybody had to come to on all those software questions. So second example of this was ultimately getting myself out of the doing of the work, the fulfillment of client work. For context, at the time, I think we had about 35 people in our firm. In the history of the firm, there had never been a person in the firm who did not make the work. That was not a thing that had, you know, ever been normalized. And I think it's probably the still the case in most small firms, you don't have someone that's just focused on strategy or the other stuff, everything besides fulfillment, when ironically, it is more often than not all the stuff besides fulfillment that will make a firm successful. Absolutely. Fulfillment going sideways can torpedo your firm. Don't get me wrong. But the big steps in a firm are how do we find better customers? How do we price what we're doing better? How do we make the next great hire? And unless those things are somebody's job, they're always going to be an afterthought, right? They're going to be set aside as soon as things get busy. But the pushback I got on this was absolutely everything that you would expect. You can manage an accounting firm without knowing how to do the accounting and the tax work. Like that doesn't make any sense. Especially if it's not something you've ever seen done before or never done yourself. You can't imagine what that would look like. All you know, and this is human nature, anytime you're going through a change, we fixate on what we are giving up. Like, we put too much weight on that and completely forget about what we are gaining by that. Next thing we're going to really good example of this is you could, you could put a cool, shiny new app in front of an accountant and most accountants are wired this way and say, look at all these cool new features. They're gonna enable all of these things. But they will find one thing that it doesn't do and they will fixate on that. And this is just how most people are gonna be wired. It's really hard to see past the thing that you're losing, even if you're gaining 10x. And when we're thinking about delegating or delegating is not, not a strong enough word. Because it's not just, I know how to do this thing and you're now going to do this thing, it's actually carving out that part of your business and being like, this isn't my job anymore. But I still think I can manage this. I can manage the people, I can hire, the people that will come and do that work. And by removing myself from doing the work, other things, other opportunities emerge, like seeing and having a better understanding of how everybody on the team did that work differently. Getting a better understanding of the value of systematizing that work so that we weren't overly reliant upon expertise and could make the outcomes more consistent by systematizing our processes. I was able to have more conversations with the team to get an idea of where everybody was at in a way that wasn't possible before. When I was doing the work, when my job was to do the work. And you know what? Getting out of that work, it made me out of touch. It just did. I still know how to do it. Like, I wasn't totally removed from it. I could speak confidently to clients about it. But was I out of touch? In some ways, I absolutely was. But I was willing to trade that for something that was better. And that's the key here, is having a willingness to be selectively out of touch, because you have to do that in order to get to the next thing. Third example, I think I shared this one once or twice. Probably super hits home for some of you. And in my tax firm, so US Tax firm tax software is very unique in that there's just an insane number of inputs, thousands of inputs, and finding the right input and toggle and combination of things to get the output to be what you want it to be just takes a tremendous amount of time. So changing tax software means rebuilding a huge amount of muscle memory. It's like having to, like, learn a new ledger app from scratch, or if you have that ledger app that you love that you always use, and every time you have to go to another one, it's like, oh my gosh, I'm so inefficient here. I would argue tax software is, is that to an even more extreme degree because there's so many inputs. And I had the genius idea of taking 30 tax professionals and putting them on a different tax software. Many of them had 20 plus years experience on the platform they were using. That's because the platform we were using was aging and not aging well. And there was another one that was better and it was the right decision. But boy was there probably three years of huge lost productivity because everybody was rebuilding that muscle memory now going through that change. I also had spent my entire professional career preparing taxes in this other platform. And at this point I had gotten myself out of client work. I was kind of this, the strategia person. I was working, working on talent acquisition, how we positioned our firm and my partner, I had one partner, we're going through this change and his background is tax prep. He doesn't make the same decision that I do. And he decides he is going to go along with the rest of the team and learn this new tax prep platform. And you can see where this is going on the other side of this conversion. Where's everybody gonna go when there's issues or questions or anything else with the tax platform? You better believe they all went running straight to my partner. And I wouldn't have it any other way. That was by design. Now I would have much rather that had not gone to my partner, would have gone to a member of our team, a designated expert, a subject matter expert, where Pete is the go to person for everything on this app and Tina is the go to person for everything else on this app. You mean to tell me that I'm going to employ 40 people and I have to be the expert on this when I'm the big boss and I have a hundred other things to do and you're the bottom of that filter of just all the exceptions, no matter what, Even if you try to delegate this stuff, there's a certain amount of things that are just going to come to you right, regardless of how well you've delegated, just because you are the big boss. But if I'm paying 40 people to come and work for me, there has to be someone else who can be the subject matter expert there. It shouldn't be me, shouldn't be the partner. And a version of this being willing to be ignorant to something. I think what my partner ultimately was blocked on was like losing street cred with the people who do do this work. And there's, there's a bunch of examples of this. Let's say you do VCFO stuff and you get a bunch of advisors to come and work for you, that's an environment where. And even if you look at like big consulting groups like McKenzie, that's an environment where the big boss, the partner, whoever it is, like they are, they are the alpha pie maker. Like, they are the best person at doing that thing. And then they bring people underneath them to do a version of what they do, but to step away from being the alpha best person at that thing. Like, there's an element of identity there where you're like, well, this is how I provided value in the past. And this is why I think that people respected me. And to choose ignorance in this regard would kind of challenge that. Right? Like, are these people just going to walk all over me because they don't think that I know how to do this stuff or, or, or think that I'm so out of touch that I'm not going to make decisions that are, I don't know, like, like make decisions that don't have sort of complete information anymore. Right. I think there's, there are a ton of cases in your professional career where that's, that's truly your only option. You can't get to that next thing unless you are willing to give that up. And there's gonna be people that don't understand that. And it will make you out of touch in some regards. But what those people need is not another person who's just like them, who's wearing the exact same hat that they are. They need somebody else with a different perspective. And because you are out of touch, you don't come in and just say, well, here's how everything's going to be. You balance what you're seeing with what they're seeing and what is actually gonna make sense for them when the rubber meets the road. And it is that combination of perspectives that leads to a better decision. Otherwise, you're literally just another person sitting there making pies like everybody else. You're just better at making pies. This episode is sponsored in part by Live Flow. Big news. Life Flow just raised rate a whole pile of money a new series A. And you better believe they're going to pour that in to make a cool stuff. Lifelow 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. Liflow 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, 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 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 Teamup, who helps you find talented accountants and in the Philippines conversation online. I actually realize a lot of folks when they think about offshoring, what they're actually thinking about is delegating work to a group that then does the work and gives you the work back. Because most of the offshoring failures I've heard, they said, you know, the work quality wasn't good enough or something like that. And that is why the only way I ever touched offshoring was just hiring my own people, just like I do onshore. I honestly don't want to chuck my work into a black box and just like hope that the quality comes back how I want it to. I just want to develop people and I want them to work with me. That's what Team up helps you do. They got recruiters on the ground in the Philippines that will find you really talented people and you develop them just like anybody else that you do in your team. And I think that's actually a big misnomer with how you offshore these days. And it's probably because a lot of the cold outreach, even though it's coming from people saying, I will do your best bookkeeping, these are Personas that offshore groups use to pull more work into that offshoring service. And you go down that path, you get into the sales process and you get like their very best person who will dazzle you. And you're like, oh, this is great. And then you send them 10 times as many projects and it goes to the back of the office and you're like, this sucks. What have I done? The solution, just hire people, test them before you hire them, train them. It's not any different than hiring people on short is what I did. You want to get started? Talk to the folks at Team Up. Link down in the show notes. So my case in this, this tax software example, I mean, my entire professional career, I think at that point I'd spent about 12 years doing tax prep. It was literally the only real life skill that I had. Like the only thing I knew how to do that somebody would pay me for. And we pick up a new tax software. And you could you really see that as, like, throwing away your career. You're like, you don't even own a tax software that you're capable of using to. To ply the only trade that you have, you know, and that trade off, that constraint, I believe, actually accelerated giving me the freedom to do all the other stuff that the firm needed doing besides just getting the work out the door. Because those folks couldn't come to me because we delegated and said no. Like, no, this is actually the person that needs to answer these questions. Just because I'm the boss does not mean that all that stuff has to come to me. I am not perpetually going to be the best at everything. Fourth example, if you are an entrepreneur, I think these things hold up. Whether we're talking about work, whether we're talking about real life. If you're an employee of someone else, I think there's probably. It's probably important to have work life boundaries as soon as you go out and you work on your own. In my opinion, the best version of work is actually not one with the same level of boundaries. Like, there's a level of integration there and fluidity, where there's gonna be seasons that are harder than others, but there's a different level of fluidity there than when you clock in for somebody else and then go home. Now, still, I mean, my greatest struggle is, like, how do you be most present in whatever it is that you're doing, rather than going to work and stressing about the family going home and just having work on the mind and not really being present. Like, you still have to find a way to do that. But because both of those things impact each other so much, at least for in, like, my entrepreneurial journey, I. I like the version of those things that was much more. I wouldn't say integrated. I would say fluid's probably the better thing. So, like, I'll take a break in the middle of the day and, like, go do some stuff with the kids. Got, you know, daughter's doing cooking class, son's in this, like, coding and robotics thing. Like, the cadence of your days will change. Even, like, when I exercise, like, that stuff is going to shift throughout the day. And I think as an entrepreneur, I'm at my best when I allow for that fluidity. But an example in the personal life of being ignorant of something. Three or four years ago, I hired. Started hiring somebody to do my landscaping, and I don't miss it. One bit. I don't. I'm perfectly okay not having to have the shed with the lawnmower and all the tools and all these different things. And I, I think what took me so long to give that up was growing up, my dad did all that stuff himself and he had, he like took pride and how nice the lawn was and all of these different things. But like in the arc of, of my life and the things that I wanted to do and the things I was excited about, the cost of having a professional come in and was like, like finance wise was a no brainer, like, why would I not do this? The blocker was actually, wow. Well, my kids think if they see that, like, am I getting big for my britches? It's like the assistant thing where we get really hung up on. Well, I want to be the type of person that has an assistant and in the process of not being willing to let someone else help you, everyone else pays the price for that. All the people that you're afraid who will think less of you because you have to ask for help, they're all the ones that ultimately pay the price for you not getting help. Even in like this sort of personal life situation, the blockers are more or less the same, by the way. Sidebar. If I can build a build upon this analogy. If I'm not in charge of cutting the grass and like picking the right kind of fertilizer and stuff like that, I can think bigger picture about, about. About landscaping plans, design, building a nice little she shed. I don't. I feel like she sheds have caught on. I. I don't know what the man version of that is or if you just call it a he shed. But I will tell you the ultimate work from home solution. It's just, it's a separate office. It's a. It's its own little building. It doesn't have to be much. Could literally just be a shed. But, oh, there is no greater gift to work than your own physical space, especially if you got kids. That's just the way to do it, man. There's something about being in the same building and then a mind shift. Ha. That just happens when you're in a different building. That's the dream, man. Okay, example number five. Not doing my own video editing. You want to talk about, like, abstract, hard sort of creative things, things that are unimaginable to delegate for many people. This is email. This is your tone and the way that you would respond to these things. And to be clear, I don't recommend pulling in somebody to Respond to emails on your behalf. If there's emails going out of your inbox, they're from you, they need to be from you. You can't be ignorant of the things that people are saying on your behalf. But oftentimes we think that what, like what we do, people are incapable, anyone else is incapable of doing or doing the same way that you would. When the reality is the vast majority of the things that we handle in our email boxes are very simple things like fetching a copy of a tax return, asking for a status update on X, Y or Z. Maybe every couple days you get something really complex and prickly that requires all those years of experience and nuance to be able to craft a response to. But that's not where you spend most of your time on email. It's the day in, day out, really boring stuff. And that's where somebody else can help you or at least get it 80% of the way there. That's actually a really big help relative to having to do it from scratch yourself. And in my case, when it came to video editing, I did so many stop starts on this. I've worked with over 50 video editors at this point, and there's still really big youtubers who will swear by no, I have to edit all of my videos myself because it's the only way for my essence and my sort of creative signature to come through in my work. But the reality is becoming ignorant to video editing, like giving that up as a skill. When you do that, you learn the art of like communicate how you may want something edited or a creative idea or an idea for a joke or something like that. You learn how to communicate that stuff and put the process of developing, be it videos or blog posts or podcasts or emails or whatever it is, you learn how to better communicate the creation of that stuff, to put it on rails and get it to better align with your expectation. Because as we know, when we send off another human being to get stuff, something done for us in a very open ended way, but then it has to come back and kind of feel like a product of you, it virtually never will. But that is a skill that can be learned. And so the whole like process of, you know, how Netflix gets media to look consistent, anybody that produces stuff for Netflix, how they get that to look consistent, like visually on the platform, how to create videos that are on brand when you have different people working on them, different people doing the editing, that's a learned skill. But the alternative, if you're not willing to give that up, what would the what would the trade offs be here? Probably just a way smaller volume of video. I would argue a lower quality of video because you're not able to zoom out and think about more strategic things. Not unlike in an accounting firm. When you're talking about fulfillment, if putting out a podcast or a blog post or whatever it is is your version of fulfillment, then somebody's gotta be thinking bigger picture about like, what's the point behind this? Are we actually connecting with the person that we're trying to connect with? Do we have the right people in the right seats to create the best version of this? And so like elevating myself beyond that, that editing role is gonna be hard. There's gonna be some real personal things about that that will be a challenge where it's like, well, they wouldn't have done it just like I would have in this way. And maybe that's a problem, maybe that's not a problem. Maybe it's actually better. But if you don't do that, you're never gonna learn what's on the other side. And that's the opportunity here is to get to that thing that's on the other side. Today's episode is sponsored in part by Cloud Accountant Staffing. They're gonna 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 moldable. 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 is 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. Been spending the last few years doing US Tax Prep Pro Connect, Tax tax online. You use that RC reports Core V. What is this guy? Sponsored by Jason Daly. 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 a link down in the show Notes. This episode is sponsored in part by Core v Gang. You run a tax firm. Can you hear it? Can, can you hear, 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 gonna 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 also 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. Core V. 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 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. Last example here that's very personal to like my last two years is making the decision to sell an accounting firm and then go and tell a bunch of accountants how to run accounting firms. And I think I've. It's something that I've obviously thought a ton about and is one of the most common questions that I get asked from. I guess from more from like family and outsiders, but also also from accountants to a degree. The question of like, how do you, how can you really hold yourself as an advisor to accounting firms if you don't run an accounting firm? And I'll tell you, when I ran an accounting firm, you know what I said about accounting firm gurus? Do they run a firm? No. No. Then I'm not going to listen to them. There's a lot of people that still say that today who they're like, yeah, you talk a lot of, you talk a lot of smack and all this stuff. But it's like, here's how it actually is. And most of those people actually don't have any knowledge of my background or, or anything like that. But I, I will, I'll tell you kind of where I've. I've landed on this through the lens of a conversation I had with a friend recently. So a few weekends ago we were hanging out with another family in town, chatting with a, with a rival dad. This guy's an attorney. Basically. He had, he'd recently transitioned to being CEO at this big legal firm. I think they've got like 150 attorneys in New York City. And we're kind of talking about what I do and I'm trying to explain what I do, which I'm not very good at. And he asks, he's like, well, were you worried when you sold your practice about becoming out of touch, like about not running your own firm? Are you going to be perceived as, you know, the, the sort of out of touch guru or the slimy online salesperson that doesn't actually do the work. And I was like, let me ask you this now that you're coo. Cause we've been talking about sort of change management and how they've been struggling to get, you know, legacy partners to adopt things. All the same issues you have in a big, big accounting firm. I said, now that you're COO and not a practicing attorney, does your team think that you're out of touch? And it was, it was, it was kind of like a knowing, like, yeah, like there is a little bit of that vibe and that rears its head a little bit when they're going through change management. And he may say, no, this is the right tool for the job, or this is a fundamentally better approach, or we need to be thinking about system, systematizing what we do better. But the folks doing the work, because they all do the work in different ways, they're like, I'm not interested in that or the way that you're talking about doing it doesn't work for specifically how I get this work done. Which brings you back full circle to, this is why we need to do it the same way in the first place. So if we don't do it the same way in the first place, then there is no, like, global way to improve the process for everyone. And it's just kind of a mess. But, but unwinding that and getting to that as a starting point, boy, that's a big project. That's, you know, how we all, like, lay in bed at night and think about, what would I do if I could rebuild it tomorrow from scratch. That's one of the biggest things to me is like, have everybody do things in a turnkey way from day one so you don't have to go through that fist fight. And then when you're looking at change, it's changing the process for everyone because everybody's doing that process the same way. I digress. But this guy says, yeah, like, there's definitely an element of, well, now they think that I'm out of touch because I'm, I'm not doing the same work that they are. And I'm like, I'm like, are you? And he's like, no, I'm. I'm more in touch than I've ever been because I can see the other side of it. Ultimately, all these people are here to achieve X, Y, Z and make money for the company. And systematizing and doing all these different things will enable them to do so better if they would just, believe me, if they would just buy in and stop falling back to the old tools and old habits that they've always done. And I'm like, yeah, like, that's absolutely the struggle. He's on one side of that now. They're all on the other side of that. And honestly, I would say I think they're both right. I think he probably is out of touch, but I think he is probably also bringing value in a different way to everybody else. Neither side is going to have a perfect answer, but it is the combination of those two things that gets you to something better. And until you're willing to divorce yourself of what you were doing before, you won't be able to represent that other perspective to get to something better. As ultimately, I, I, I asked him, when he posed the question of am I going to be out of touch? I said, do you ever feel out of touch knowing that you spend all of your time and all of your effort pouring it into this one single firm when there's countless other firms in, in New York City alone, going through all the exact same problems, exact same blockers, making the same decisions in completely siloed ways all over town? I said, do you ever feel out of touch because you don't have a window into all those other different law firms? And he's like, no, because that's just not a thing that people do. Like, you don't, you don't talk about what you're doing. Don't talk shop in that way. And that's the context that I have now that I didn't have before. The fact that every single week I talk with, I don't know, I don't know how you put a number to it. I talk with a lot of different accounting firms every single week and have this insane level of perspective because it is all that I do, because I don't spend 80% of my time working on a firm. And then this being the second thing, all I do is talk with other firms and share the best ideas and try to, like, bring all that sort of social proof together in a way that is helpful for folks and reflect that back out there. And had I not walked away from my firm, I couldn't have done that, or at least it would have been a fraction of the volume of what I'm able to do today. And so ultimately, I am out of touch. I've never been more out of touch with running an accounting firm day to day than I am now. But what I've traded it for is something different. It's something that's helpful to a specific type of person. It may not be helpful to staff accounts or junior accounts or a whole bunch of other people. But for people that are trying to make hard decisions and they don't know who to trust and where to turn to for picking a practice management system or like making some hard strategic decision where software vendors are telling you to do this and you look every, everywhere you look, there is someone with, you know, some sort of financial gain at stake that wants you to do A or B. This is what I always grappled with. I'm like, oh my gosh, I can, I can tune into a hundred webinars this week or this month, but every single one of them is run by a software vendor. Who do I believe I could go to this consultant, but they've got partnerships with platforms X, Y and Z and ultimately they get affiliate money. And so they're going to lead me to that platform. Where do I go for independent information? This is what I needed when I was on the other side of that. There's gonna be people always that disagree with it and that's fine. And if I went out and I tried to launch an accounting firm tomorrow, I like to think that I could do it well. But there's a whole bunch of parts of it that I would not do well and I'd have to pull in people to get help on that stuff from day one. But I fundamentally wouldn't be able to do what I can do now had I not given up what I did before. And as I've shared before, ultimately the decision to leave the firm, even though I was letting down a ton of people and ton of clients, staff people that had come to work for me that I'd hired off of Twitter, for goodness sakes. The decision to leave all those people, as hard as that was and as bad of a financial outcome as it was for me, basically walking away from it, the something better on the other side of that was being able to put out a video each week that a thousand firms could benefit from just a fundamentally different level of leverage. Being able to learn more about what other firms are doing just to enrich sort of my framework for what is the best way to run an accounting firm. That was the better thing for me. That came with the willingness to be a little more ignorant about the day to day running of an accounting firm. We all have things right now that we, that we aspire to do and we want to get better at, we want to learn more about man. If I can only work on the business or only just focus on this type of work or that type of work, I actually think for most of us, what's probably stopping us from doing that is a lack of willingness to turn our brains off to certain things that that you just can't do while you're moving forward. The folks that have like prolific levels of output where you see them and like how are they doing all of these things? It's because there's a bunch of things that you're doing that they are not doing. It is as much about what you don't do as it is what you do. Hopefully that helps. If you got any stuff that you have written out of your life or become ignorant to that you don't regret, man, drop a note in the comments. You could help inspire somebody. Hopefully that gets you over a hump. Take care. Sa.