346 Running A Side Hustle Accounting Firm in 2025 | A Complete Guide

Running an accounting firm can be an incredibly rewarding thing. A super flexible lifestyle. But the place to start for virtually everyone is that that thing on the side seeing if you actually want to do this, like, can I actually run my own firm? Like, could I actually build a client list from scratch? Today we're talking about side hustle firms. A simplified framework for how to get that thing off the ground. Decide if it's something that's for you and if you want to grow it, how to take that sucker to the moon. Maybe if that's what you want to do. Let's dig into it. How to run a side hustle firm that's super profitable and might just lead to being the real thing, you know, the main thing. Let's do it. Hey, if this is your first time joining us, welcome to the Jason on Firms podcast. We talk about running small accounting firms. I'm in the US So it's a little US biased. We're usually talking about bookkeeping and tax firms, but a lot of this stuff applies anywhere. This week, we're talking about all the different types of firms first, like that side hustle thing, because that's where just about everybody starts. And it's where you should start, because you really don't know if you want to run a firm until you've actually done it. Even if you are in an accounting firm today, oftentimes you are shielded from, like, client relationship management, from going out and finding the next good client. And you may find as you start wading into this, like, oh, I actually, actually enjoyed bookkeeping, or I enjoyed doing tax prep, but I really don't enjoy all this other stuff or the opposite, which was the case for me. I was, like, mediocre at the doing of the work. But what I loved was building the machine, like the systems, attracting people to the firm, bringing in clients. That was super fulfilling for me. And the reality is you just don't know if you're going to enjoy that until you do it. So don't, like, cannonball into it. The best way to start here is with that side hustle. Tomorrow we're talking solo person firms. The days after that, bigger firms. We have a ton of, like, folks that previously ran side hustles and are actively running side hustles that listen to this podcast. Would love to see your thoughts in the comments throughout. To make this as valuable as possible for people who are either at this stage or are exploring it, we're going to be digging into mainly three things. Kind of a simplified framework for how you invest in making your firm better via its systems, via its tools and via its offers. The things that it holds out and says, hey, I can do this thing for you and you're now going to give me money to do that thing. So we're gonna dig into those three things. But first, just like a really quick bit of playing house, because this is a blocker for a bunch of people more than it should be just to knock out a whole bunch of the initial things people get blocked by. Should you get insurance? Yes. Get liability insurance? Should I set up an entity for this? Probably. Should I. Do I need to go out and get XYZ credential? Usually no. In fact, in my opinion, going out getting credential is oftentimes a form of procrastination. There's certain types of work you got to have a credential for like a test work. But if you're talking about small firm stuff, if you're doing bookkeeping, don't worry about it. If you're doing like advising, like VCFO stuff, don't worry about it. If you're doing tax work, in some situations you will need a credential. But again, like this stuff, by and large, it is like playing house. It's a waste of time. If clients are buying your services based on a credential, you've already lost the battle. And we're going to talk about that when we get into offers. If they don't have a compelling reason to think that you're the best person to do this job, then they are shopping based on the premise that you will give them more for less. And that's something that we want to avoid from day one because that is just, that is just a race to the bottom, my friend. Last, last consideration here is whether you can call yourself an accounting firm in the United States. And I'm an American, so I know absolutely nothing about anywhere but the United States. But in the United States there are some states where you can't call yourself an accounting firm unless you are a cpa. And usually the body to make that rules will be the state board of accountancy. Worth double checking. Can you hold yourself out as an accounting firm or not? If you can't, that's not a big deal. It doesn't mean that you can't deliver, say bookkeeping services. It just changes what you can call yourself. And the trap is actually two, like six sell what you do in terms of the services. If I say I will sell you bookkeeping, then immediately they're going to price shot me against Everybody else that does bookkeeping because I'm not solving a unique problem. And so it's not a big deal if we can't call ourselves an accounting firm. It's actually something that we're kind of trying to avoid, to find better work, but we're going to get into all that. So I want you to think of your accounting firm as a machine. And even if it's just you, and at this stage it is, when that machine runs, it pumps work out. And people pay you for that work, right? And oftentimes we dive headlong into that machine and the doing of the work. And we never actually, like, come up for air and consider, is this the work I should be doing? Is there somebody out there who would actually pay me twice as much to do the same work? And if we end up too fixated in the doing of the work, in operating the machine, then we miss out on all sorts of opportunities. Because what actually, like, moves your firm forward is not the operating of the machine. It's all the other stuff that happens around that. And so the framing I'm giving you for the things that happen around that, that is the systems, the tools, and the offers. Now, different stages of running a firm require different things. For example, for firms that are closing in on, say, a million in revenue, that is where both your systems and your offers break completely. Because at that stage, you have to really get serious about removing yourself from the work. You have to get serious about bringing in clients that aren't just great for you, but are great for your team, for the machine. Because it's really hard for a single person to, like, be the point person for clients beyond about a million in revenue. But at the side hustle stage, what most people do is they just go headlong into doing the work, into operating the machine. And so things like systems are an afterthought because you're not templatizing how the work gets done. You're the only one doing it, and you can just remember everything that you did. So why do I need a system? You're also doing something different every single time because you're, like, taking in any and all, like, types of work that you can even get your hands on. So I'm going to build a system around that when every single thing is different. And then tools, oftentimes tools can be an afterthought too, because at this stage, most people, you just don't even know what you don't know. Like, you don't even know where to begin to look for tools. So You're. You got, like, spreadsheets on spreadsheets, managing everything. And that's not the end of the world at the beginning. But what I had to get, like, 95% of the attention in the beginning is your offers, basically your marketing, your positioning, what you're trying to do for people. Because client acquisition ultimately is. Is what gets you from a side hustle to sweet. You run a solo firm now. And so most people, baby step into this with a client or two, and in their head, they're like, oh, man, if I can. If I can just get to where I can replace my. My salary with this, like, then I'm off to the races. And so those systems, the tools, a lot of that stuff, maybe wrongly, to a degree, take a backseat, but it really does, at this stage, boil down to client acquisition. So let's start there with offers. Now, I frame this as offers because ultimately what I do for people has to, like, deliver some sort of outcome for them. Has to take them from A to B. I could sell bookkeeping, but you know who else sells bookkeeping? Like, everyone in the world, like, folks can go hire somebody offshore to do bookkeeping for less than a couple bucks an hour. So why would they come to you to do it? Because I don't want to compete with everybody else on price. But as long as I just sell undifferentiated bookkeeping or tax prep or advisor, whatever it is, if I'm just selling that service, then I'm up against the entire world. So instead, what I want to. So instead, what I want to craft is a really compelling offer. So for a specific type of person who is maybe at a stage in their business where they're blocked or where they're feeling this acute pain, how can my offer get them over the hump, get them to something better through. And it's in all likelihood through delivering, you know, bookkeeping or tax services or some advisory, that sort of thing. But we're framing our services through the lens of what it can enable for their entire business. And if you are the partner that can get them there, then you're no longer competing on price. They're not benchmarking you against their mom doing the bookkeeping or some random person. This is the difference between selling an offer, putting something out that is so compelling that the right person will be like, oh, I have to have that. And it's something you can absolutely do. It's the difference between standing that up and being like, I will do your bookkeeping for $10 an hour, which is just Kind of a losing battle. And honestly, where a lot of people end up stuck for a huge part of their career. Like the folks you see on, on Upwork, on Fiverr, on that sort of thing. Like ultimately they're trading time for money. And the beauty of being able to run your own business is to be able to escape that is to be doing higher leverage work where that machine actually works while you sleep now, or you plug other people into it if that's something you want to do down the road. And because it is systematized, it just happens. Work goes in, work goes out, money comes in. Like that is the beauty of building a business. Otherwise you're ultimately doing what you were doing before when you worked for someone else. You're still just trading time for money, right? So we want to escape that. By the way, how you like build an offer. Like you could go so, so deep on that. A hundred million dollar offers. The book like that's probably the best place to start. That's one of Alex Hermosi's books. Basically, how to build an offer that is so compelling that someone will feel dumb saying no. And you may think like, how do I, how do I get to something that compelling? Doing accounting, you got to get specific. You got to find somebody you know, say, say the dentist who's going from one office to two offices for the first time, the construction guy. That's like hiring people to his team for the first time. And they can't even begin to think how they would do that or run payroll or anything like that. How do you stand up an offer that's like, I will unlock this for your business. And it's an absolute no brainer for you at this place that you're at. We're looking for those offers that solve really painful pains that enable that entrepreneur to do something greater than they're capable of doing today. But a bunch of thoughts on how you approach this offer. So think about all of the things that you will do for clients in terms of a value ladder. What do you think of your core service being right now? Maybe that's monthly bookkeeping, maybe that's preparing your individual tax return on an annual basis. Maybe that's doing your audit once a year or getting on a coaching call once a quarter. That core service, Think of that as the middle of your value ladder because not everybody's going to want the exact same thing from you. And you will have some, some clients who are willing to pay you more to do more, some clients who want less. If all you have is that single service in your value ladder, you're not optimizing for the variability in what those people want. And so when we think about coming down the value ladder, usually we do this to attract a better client. Big thing to always be remembering is even once you reach capacity, and maybe for you, there's a long, long ways down the road, even once you reach capacity, while you may not need more clients, everybody needs better clients. I don't care if you're a side hustler working out of the closet of your bedroom or if you're Big four, everybody needs better clients. And that's why, unfortunately, marketing, building offers like all of these things that we don't maybe want to do as accountants, because it's not something we identify as being like part of an accountant's responsibility. It's something that is always part of your small firm. Because most small firm problems, like both in the beginning and long term, they can practically all be solved by finding clients who will pay you more to do the same work. And those clients will pay you more when you're solving a more painful problem. And the way that we attract those people these days is coming down that value ladder, attracting folks with like, free or low cost value. And so examples of that are like your social media posts, your blog posts, maybe your podcast. Totally free, but really valuable for a specific type of person. That's an example of coming down your value ladder. Now, most firms, all they have is like, here is the relatively high bar to enter my firm and become a client. We have to provide like this level of service for you, otherwise we aren't interested. And as they go up market, oftentimes firms get like, like snootier and more selective. And they're like, oh, you can only be on our client list if you're paying us a minimum of, you know, $10,000 a year or something like that. And the trap there is the bottom rung of your value ladder being too high. Because if nobody can, like get a taste, if nobody can even understand what it's like to work with you, it's tremendously risky, the notion of committing to a firm you don't about just on, you know, someone else's recommendation or something like that. So even those firms that are up market, they need to build out the bottom of the value ladder as well. And that needs to start with free stuff. Otherwise these days, like, how do people find you? But oftentimes it's really valuable to have something between there and becoming a client as well. And so that could be you know, a $200 product or, or something like that. The goal is to pull that person in a little bit further to get them comfortable with you. Because I'll let you in on a secret. Once they have gone through that process and they know a little bit about you, when they are ready to become an actual full blown client, they will assign much more value to the work that you do, because they've already built that relationship a bit. If they come into you with zero context at that point, arguably you're up against every other firm. Like you have no market power. If they perceive you as an expert and solving the problem that they have right now, where else are they going to get that solution? They may be able to go out and find some others, but you've gone from being up against every single other bookkeeper, tax preparer, whatever it is, to now being pretty unique. And if the client got value from that, that product that they went through, that you put together, then they're going to be even more compelled, like even more convinced that you can solve their other problems going forward. So be thinking about what the bottom of your value ladder is. If the only thing you do for people is bookkeeping or advisory or something like that, you're missing out on what is a really, really big world that will only find you if there's some sort of hook out there so that they can learn more about you. Now, same thing is true of the top of your value ladder. And over time, in general, you want this to be moving up, not necessarily moving down. But if for example, you have 20 clients and 18 of them are at like your top service level, it means it's time to build another rung higher than that. And it doesn't mean that they have to consume more of your time or anything like that. In fact, each time you add another rung to the value ladder, that work outta be half again, maybe 2x as profitable as the work at the rung below. Otherwise why would you do it? Right? If it's just more of the same, then there's no use in having that ladder. But the reality is people have wildly different appetites for what they will pay for support. And building out that value ladder captures that value more effectively and longer term attracts more people who will go higher up that ladder. If you don't even go high up the ladder, how are you going to track somebody that will pay you top dollar down the road? Like if you don't even do that work that people will pay really well for? So practical example of that for say A bookkeeper may be, uh, in the beginning, you're just doing, like, books for people once a year because they need their books done for their tax return over time. Then maybe you start getting into it once a quarter because the business owner is like, it might be good to be able to see my numbers more frequently than that. And then you move up to like, oh, we're actually going to do it every month because they're paying closer attention to their numbers. Each step up this value ladder you get, you will attract a different type of client who is probably a more premium client that values what you do a little bit more. But it can go further. Let's say 80% of your client base is now having you do monthly books. What's the next step? Well, maybe it's to actually hop on a call when you deliver the financial statements and you walk them through a few points of what, what you see on there that could be helpful insights for the business owner. And this is something they now need to pay extra for. It needs to be a more profitable service than it was before. As in if you were, you know, 10 hours into $1,000 a month project before that next rung can't be 20 hours for $2,000. Like, this needs to be more profitable. And I don't recommend charging hourly. That's a whole other sidebar. Generally I'm going to recommend, like, you try to come into an engagement with a fixed price. But then as you build that next rung of the value ladder, ultimately the inputs that are required for that service that may cost twice as much are not two times the inputs. So as you go up, like, it needs to be an offering that you can make more money on. But back to the bookkeeper example, maybe that next rung is, yeah, you're hopping on a call each month with them. Or maybe there was an intermediary rung there where you just hop on a call once a quarter. But that's what we need to be thinking about is how do we continue to go more premium. And the trap can be just to, like, deliver one type of dog food and that's it. This episode is sponsored in part by Live Flow. Hey, cool new thing. Live Flow just shipped in their platform dashboards. So Live Flow, if you remember, awesome way to connect your QuickBooks and your 0 ledgers with Excel or Google Sheets. You now have just a button in your Google Sheets or Excel that can connect you to, like any accounting ledger you have access to. But they're building on that to now offer dashboards where Via the same ledger connections, you can now pull like widgets into a dashboard for your client. Because it's live flow, they've templatized a whole bunch of it. So you can swipe KPIs, build out this super nice visual for your client and all you gotta do to share it with them, just copy a little link, send it to them, bada bing, bada boom. Cool dashboard, bro. As I told you recently, Liflo just raised a big old Series A. So they're putting all sorts of cool new investment into the product. We're checking out. Link down in the show notes, bud. Okay. This episode is sponsored in part by Carbon. Hey, quick call out. Do you run a big, a big firm? You push them past like, I don't know, 50 people or do you aspire to be a big firm? Common problem with cloud practice management systems is they have never historically been particularly suited for bigger firms. Carbon, they're solving for it though commonly. Talk with Chad Davis on this podcast. He's got a big firm they're running on Carbon. It's one of the best scaling platforms out there for a number of reasons. They've got one of the better sort of reporting systems in the game. They've got their own sort of practice intelligence tool set for like planet capacity, stuff like that. But my favorite thing is they've got email built in triage. So email can lead to like task assignments and all that. It's all happening in one place rather than going and spending half of your day in email in a completely different system. That's all happening inside of Carbon. It's my single favorite thing about them and they always get annoyed because they bring it up and they're like, no, but we do other stuff. And I'm like, no, but I like this. No shortage of PM options out there. But if you are a high growth firm wanna do big firm things, Carbon might be for you. Check out the link down the show notes. This episode is sponsored in part by Team up, who helps you find talented accountants 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, 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 bookkeeping, these are Personas that offshore groups use to pull more work into that offshoring service. And you go down that path, get into the sales process, 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. Not any different than hiring people onshore is what I did. You want to get started? Talk to folks at Team Up. Link down in the show notes. Now. Everybody's got to start somewhere with this side hustle thing. A couple of things I wanted to call out that you may not be considering increasingly, if you already work for an accounting firm, increasingly, they are actually open to letting you take some clients. Oftentimes, especially if you leaving the firm is going to leave that them in a lurch. They will sooner send you with some clients than just have you walk away and not have a way to serve those clients. So if you currently work for an accounting firm and you're really serious about going out and doing your own thing, doesn't hurt to ask. It's one of those like, what do you have to lose type of situations. Another thing that's an option for some people is actually going out and buying a small book of business, like going out getting an SBA loan. And the reason why both of these might be a good option for you, even like buying firms from your past employer, is that the clients that pay the bills in the beginning and give you that cash Runway in 0% of situations, will they be your forever clients? They just won't be. Even if you build that from scratch and from day one, you're like, yeah, I figured out my niche. I know what I'm specializing in. We got this. No problem. You just, you absolutely don't like there's no way you're going to get it right on the first guess. The things you're going to be capable of doing will continue to grow and people will charge you more or pay you more for doing the same work. So under no situation is like the client list that you are building in the beginning going to be your forever client list. And so if there's an opportunity to buy a small book of business and you're like, yeah, I don't, I don't, I don't know. I'm going to have fun, like doing this work forever. That's not the point. Like, you could churn all those clients in three years. The most important function in that book of business can, can do for you is to pay the bills in the short term is to give you the Runway to totally focus on doing your own thing. So don't get too caught up in the beginning with that client profile being just perfect in the beginning, man, we're trying to pay the bills to give you the bandwidth to focus on, like, building offers that will bring in a better client for the long term. Ultimately, whether you are a small firm or whether you are a big firm, your firm will always be in this constant process of being reinvented one client at a time. And as soon as you don't do that, as soon as you stop doing that, a firm stagnates, it doesn't grow, and you stop taking in more profitable work. And it doesn't have to be this big, spooky, dramatic thing where you're like, oh, I'm never serving this type of person again. And now I'm, now I only work with phlebotomists. It doesn't have to be like that. It is. What is the next one client that will pay us, you know, 1 1/2 x what our current clients pay us for the same work. And you've now got this more profitable client. You can ask them for referrals. You have a new, like a client, and when you bring that client in, it lets you cut a couple legacy projects. So you've got the bandwidth to actually do that work, serve them well, and your firm's making more money in less time. Right? That's the goal. That constant reinvention, one client at a time. Okay? Practical ways to build quickly to attract folks to your firm. Number one, you got to have a lead magnet. A lead magnet that is a solution to a very specific paying for a specific type of entrepreneur. So if I work with people that build boats, boat makers, is that still a Thing, I don't even know what are the problems that they deal with? Is it regulations? Is it inconsistent cash cycles? Because maybe they get paid per boat and they only make a couple a year. I don't know very much about boats. Maybe it's the cost of the facility. You have to. Have to make a boat. Is that a thing? I'm thinking like cruise ships or death stars. Like the facility, you have to have to coordinate big things like that. Maybe that's a pain. I don't. I have. I have no idea. But your goal is to make a lead magnet that will be specific and valuable enough to where if somebody sees it when they're scrolling through their social media algorithm, they're like, skirt, I got to grab this. They click on it, they jump out. They have to give you their email address to download it. Bada bing, bada boom. Now we've got one more person on our list. Now, not all lead magnets are made equal. Some are really good, some are not. This thing that I'm recording right now may one day be a lead magnet for people that are thinking about running their own side hustle, counting firmware, or who are doing it right now. You might have gotten here from a lead magnet. Know that you're not going to nail it on your first try, but be looking out for these really painful hooks that you can build lead magnets for that will just make people stop. And the trap here is. Is going generic. Like, the most common thing I see people get wrong is building lead magnets for things like how to read a balance sheet, how to. How to read your tax return, stuff like that. And while that stuff's valuable and your clients probably really need that, when you go that general, you are up against every other person who can do that thing out there. And the more general you go, the higher that bar will be, the harder it will be to get it to convert. On an algorithm where you're up against everybody else. Like, the. The test that I use is, imagine you're walking through a bookstore, and you got all these book covers looking at you, and there is a book cover that is so specific to you that it makes you stop in your tracks. And you're like, oh, I. I have to grab this right now. Like, it looks like this book was written for me. And so for you, as a. As an accounting firm owner, like, what would that look like? Maybe you're. Maybe you're trying to work with vet clinics, and there's a book on the shelf that's like, how to build A killer side hustle accounting firm for vet clinics. And you're like, oh my gosh, somebody wrote this book. Like, it's is. Are they watching me right now? I have to grab this. Like, that's the level of specificity that we need. And the good news is when you get that specific, it doesn't have to be amazing. Like, and if you haven't done content before and all that, like, it's not going to be amazing, so the bar isn't going to be as high. And this whole question of specificity. Oftentimes when people come into side hustle firms, they, they think I have to go super general because I need to take in anything and everything. And your client list might be just that. Like, that is the reality in the beginning, you're, you're doing whatever you can to pay the bills. And so the day in and day out might be a mishmash of a whole bunch of different things, but the way that you present yourself outwardly and the way that you invest your time for, for marketing purposes and that sort of thing are geared around what is the next client you want to bring in. And that doesn't need to be the same as the clients you already have. In this day and age where everybody consumes stuff from an algorithm like grown adults, idle moments are spent scrolling on their phone and it's, it's weird, it's probably not great, but that's the reality that we're living in and the reality where consumption is algorithmic. The things that you put into it have to be specific enough to find the person you want to work with. And this is like, maybe the best part about algorithms is they can find very specific pockets of people. And so in the past, before the Internet, if you ran an accounting firm and you wanted to niche, you wanted to specialize, it meant like, well, there's three dental clinics in town. I guess that's my total addressable market. Or meant going to conferences and like meeting people like that. These days, like post Covid, where everybody just does virtual meetings, Even if you live across the street from each other, when people are learning on social media and finding people that they trust and consuming content from folks on social media and it's easier than ever before to build a niche or like a micro niche firm. And that's a big opportunity because those very specific pains people will pay better for them to be solved. So the old notion that when you come in, you got to go super general and do anything and everything, while in many ways it is true, because if you're trying to pay the bills and somebody comes to you with paying work, you're probably going to take it. But that's not an argument for having a super, super generic website. That's not an argument for doing a super vanilla social media content because nobody's going to consume that if it doesn't speak to anyone. Spec. I truly believe the fastest way to build a client list is to be as visible as possible for a very specific type of person. And so if you're going, let's, let's go back to vet clinics. What are the podcasts, the newsletters, what are the different things that folks who run vet clinics consume? And how can you be the most visible bookkeeper, tax preparer, cfo, whatever it is, how can you be the most visible person in that space for what you do? I truly believe that is the shortest path to building a client list that's not just going to get you to, oh, sweet, we just covered my salary. Now I can go do this thing full time, but actually be like good, well, paying clients for a little, little longer term because they see you as the solution provider in their space. Now the blocker we all have, which, which is healthy to a degree, is what. I'm not a. What do you mean? I'm not an expert on serving vet clinics. Like, I've only done one or two of these, or maybe I've done none of them. I've just read about them in books. I'll let you in on a secret. All of the general accounting firms out there, which the vast majority of accounting firms are very general. They will serve just about any type of business. When the first vet clinic walks into a general firm that may have a thousand other clients, are they experts? I would argue they don't know the first thing about doing vet clinics. And behind the scenes, like, the bulk of it may be the same, but that's not always the case. Like virtually any type of business, there are things very specific to it that can be optimized if you have a better understanding of how that business works. It may not mean there's tax laws specific to them or that the accounting is any different, but because you understand how those businesses work better and how they make their money, you're ultimately going to be a better advisor to them if you have an understanding of that space. So if you don't feel like you have an abundance of that expertise right now, all it takes is, is investing in having conversations with more people in that space, reading the publications and very quickly you have light years more expertise than all the other general firms that that same client could have walked into. And it would be the first vet clinic they ever served. Right. So absolutely, we get blocked on this notion of, like, well, I don't have this expertise today. If you don't build it, who's going to? And it's not as if, if that same client went to another firm, they would get this, like, way superior experience. Now we're going to circle back to like, your personal expertise a little later because it does matter. But I think we are, we are biased to move too slow on this when the reality is if you look around, like, well, who has the expertise to serve vet clinics? Like, who's really better positioned than me? And if I just go deep on this for the next month, like, I'm pretty sure I'm going to be ahead of like 95% of people in my space on serving those specific people. Right. All right. For finding clients, always be thinking about, what are the hubs, the watering holes where those folks hang out? How could you build a relationship with a consultant in that space? Again, the more specific, the better. And so building a relationship with a consultant, to me, that looks like offering value to them. Like, if they run monthly sessions for their clients, say, like, hey, I could come in and talk bookkeeping or tax or whatever it is that you do. Find a way to offer value to them. Podcasters, every little itty bitty niche has podcasters now find a way to, to provide value to them. Something, something more compelling than the awful, like, amount of spam everybody's getting about. Like, having guests on a podcast. Like, if you run a podcast today, you get a huge amount of spam. Trying to get folks onto podcasts, like, make it very specific. Your, your outreach, like, man, I, I, I love what you're doing. I love this episode or that call out specifically. Just a heads up, I do tax work, I do accounting work with people in this domain. There's probably a cool podcast episode to be done around X or Y or Z or even just you have, if you have any questions on this stuff, like, reach out anytime. Like, just try to be helpful. You're not coming in saying, I need to get on your podcast so that all of your listeners will come work with me. Like, that's not the goal. Other good hubs, people who write newsletters, influencers, associations, there's so many associations out there for anything and everything you could imagine. And they, they even come with a different sort of weight, like heft around their authority, where if you can hijack some of that trust. That's really valuable, especially early days. Software companies. Oh, baby. If you got software companies that are making stuff specific to a domain that you're interested in, they got big old marketing budgets that they're pumping into getting in front of all of the same people that you want to get in front of. So how can you be a resource to that software company? Either through helping them develop content, like going on a webinar with them. Again, the goal is to be the most visible person for that specific type of entrepreneur. Like when they think, oh, I need an attorney or oh, I need an auditor, you want them to go straight to you because they've just seen you out there more than anybody else. Now, ultimately, longer term, you're probably going to build your own media platform and that is a worthwhile thing to do. Like for example, if you, if you run a real estate podcast and folks listen to your real estate podcast for a year before they become a client, when they come in the door, they're already, already going to have a relationship with you and be like way more ready to pay more for your services because of that. And that's a really powerful thing that, like asymmetric intimacy or that parasocial relationship that's there when you have that with somebody. I mean like you are the guru to them, you are one of one. So you're not competing against the rates of other people. And that's an awesome advantage to have. That being said at this stage in firm running, because building those media platforms takes time. You probably don't yet know enough like who you want to work with in order to start investing in that yet. So I would probably more look for the shortcut of like collaborating with people who already have the audiences, helping consultants, influencers, associations, that sort of thing. Also right now, nothing beats LinkedIn. LinkedIn is like so powerful. If you're looking for the, if you're doing anything on social media, like the best ROI right now is LinkedIn. Be valuable. Don't just like fill that platform with more fluff because goodness sakes, it doesn't need any more. The most useful people on social media win. And it's not enough to be funny. Like I can make silly, funny stuff that people will engage with, but it doesn't ultimately aid my business. So don't get sucked into the trap of vanity metrics, of making things that people will just engage with, make things that are useful. Because ultimately we want people to go from social media to click through your lead magnet, to be on your email list to ultimately grow into becoming a client. So just be, be ruthlessly useful. If you are going to invest any time on social media, best place to do it right now is probably LinkedIn. This episode is sponsored in part by Ignition. Come, come, come, come, come. Here's the thing. Here's the thing about client bill billing. You can't bill for the time you spend billing. You can't, you can't. It is pure waste. And we're bad at billing because it's, it's icky. You let things slide, you don't get paid, you waste time. Waste time chasing people for money. That's not what I did. I would just, I didn't want to waste time chasing them and so I would just, I just eat it. Don't do that. This is where Ignition comes in. The leading revenue generation platform for accounts and professional services. When I was running my first firm, Ignition wiped out our ar, it's true. And significantly reduced the time spent billing clients, saving our partners over a thousand hours in the first year because he didn't have to bill all that stuff manually. Man. With Ignition, we won more business with impressive online proposals. No more Hustle and hustle and PDFs and Word docs. We automatically pulled payment upfront or at the end of a job when it was done. No more dialing for dollars. We transitioned our firm to more recurring revenue and better manage scope creep. No more leaving money on the table. Ignition is making thousands of firms more money and genuinely made us more profitable. Check out why over 7,000 of the smartest businesses run on ignition@ignitionapp.com I'll put a link in the show notes. This episode is sponsored in part by Fin Daily, actually an app that I founded a few years ago and then sold thin Daily. In short, it's almost like an email marketing platform, but for all of your financial data. So you build these email templates and then you plug in like banking balances, QuickBooks or zero data, like outstanding bills, outstanding invoices. You connect this email template to all these different variables and then you set that email to go out to your client on a recurring basis on a schedule, and then right before it sends, makes an API called all those sources, pulls the most updated TED information into the email and sends it out. Now, I was doing a cash reporting process for my clients. They were paying top dollar for it, but it was a pain in the neck to go out and like wrangle all the stuff I needed for those emails. So I actually founded this to automate that process. How's that sound? A fully automated cash reporting service that your clients will pay top dollar for you. It's a thing I could tell. You could have done it. Pretty nice. Fin Daily will even let you connect with like multiple accounting files so you could push out a single email digest pulling from like multiple sources. Bank accounts, credit cards. Pretty cool stuff. Okay, check out the link down the show notes to learn more. This episode is sponsored in part by Financial Sense because Workflow Con is back baby, with the theme Freedom to Scale. Unlock your firm's potential for operational freedom and profitable growth. It's happening October 22nd and 23rd. Virtual conference, totally free. Not just for Financial Sense users. This year they're helping firm owners remove themselves from the day to day routine so they can stop being the bottleneck in their firm. Systematize it so it can run without you, giving you the freedom to focus on scaling, standardize your processes to empower your employees and improve client satisfaction. Scale your firm, whatever that means for you. Hiring new staff, getting acquired by P.E. get that out of my ad read, work 10 hours a week and travel or hit a million in revenue budget. Smart people are going to be there speaking Don Brolin, Sabrina Paris, Kelly roars, Nancy McClellan, Erica Good, Chadwick Davis, Blake Olives, Brandon Hall, Kelahill Trewick, Kelly Parker. A lot of people we've had on this pod. Logan McGrathman, Ryan Lazanis and others. Fun virtual conference, really. I'll put a link to register down in the show notes. Check that one out. One last thought on your offers and we're not going to go too in depth here on like what would an offer even be like again, $100 million offers. That's the book to go deep there on. And we've done other content on this in the past. In fact, at the end of this, I'm going to hand you off to a playlist of podcasts I've done. Building firms from scratch. Like example niche firms. What would I do from $0 in revenue? We've got three or four of those now, so I'll hand you off to that after this. But one other thought on your offers. How you hold yourself out and say, you ought to come work with me. Always remember that when it comes to work that the client doesn't understand. And if you do tax work, if you do bookkeeping work, whatever it is, like there's not an easy way to benchmark that work you just did against the same work another professional would do. Like if you tried to benchmark a tax return, even if one tax turn got a better outcome than the other, like, it may not have been correct. Still, same thing with bookkeeping. Like you have two firms do the same work, the outcome is probably going to be different, and it's hard to say or whether one is going to be more correct than the other. There's definitely incorrect things that you could do, right? But there are probably an infinite number of more or less correct possible outcomes via classifications being done a little bit differently. And your client is the point I'm getting at here. Your client, they don't know enough to know, well, this one was better than that one. And as long as that is the case, what they will make buying decisions on and the value that they will perceive in what you do is going to be totally based on the things about that process they do understand. Were you responsive? Did they enjoy talking with you? Did it sound like you knew what you were saying? Was your bed in the background when you hopped on a zoom call with them? These are all things that as accountants, last thing we want to worry about, right? Like, I just want to be a grinder. I want to go do the work. Like that's, that's fun. But your clients, they don't understand the work. So perception is a reality for them. Do you really think that the difference between a $2 an hour bookkeeper on Upwork versus a $200 an hour boutique firm for a specific type of person, do you really think that that firm, the output of their bookkeeping is 200x more valuable than the output of that upwork bookkeeper? Boy, I. No, almost certainly not. Maybe the upwork bookkeeper isn't as good. Maybe there's a few errors. Maybe they're better also because there's also a lot of firms out there that don't turn out like amazing work. So how do we make sense of that? How do we, like, use that to our advantage? You don't do stuff like look at average pricing. If people are buying your services like relative to whatever the average is, then, then what you're selling is completely undifferentiated as opposed to if they perceive you as the guru in a space, or if you're the only bookkeeper they know that works with, you know, design agencies or something like that. And if you are that specific and the client knows it, don't let them strong arm you into average rates because you're not average. You know their problems better than the average bookkeeper. But also know that until you're delivering something that that entrepreneur can't get Somewhere else, then you fundamentally, by definition, are competing on the basis of doing more for less. And that is a losing battle. And honestly, probably 90% of small firms, like that's where they're at right now, they don't do anything that that entrepreneur couldn't get somewhere else. And so the reason the entrepreneur is with them is because they think they can get more there for their price than whatever. The alternative is factoring in like switching costs and the headache of all that. Right. And this is like a sort of a punch in the gut to a degree. But oftentimes we like to think that all the reasons the client's staying with us was because I'm the best. It's because the vibes are so good when we chat. It's because there's nobody else as good as me. We like to tell ourselves this, and maybe sometimes to a degree that is true, but I would hazard a guess that it's not true as much as we like to think it is. When you give that person a deal who's been a client for a long time, I would like to think that they're still with you because you're such a, you're such a swell person for giving them that deal. But I can tell you what the reality probably is, is they can't get that deal anywhere else and that's why they're not leaving. So you want to avoid the trap of ultimately competing on the basis of providing more for less. And until you have specialized a bit, until you're perceived by, by that client as someone who is uniquely capable of solving the problems that they have, then that's exactly what you're doing. You're competing on the basis of providing more for less. And as the world gets bigger, as it's easier to find a bookkeeper or tax preparer anywhere in the world, even as AI like productized solutions like the TurboTax, the QuickBooks, Live Bookkeeping, these big companies that, that do automated versions of this as they come up market, if that client doesn't think you can do that stuff any better than they can, you know, fully automated solutions that don't do a lot of the things that you do, or different markets where the pricing for what you do is completely different. Right, okay, that's all I'm going to dig into on, on offers for this one because we do have a whole playlist of like, examples of how to build your firm from the ground up. So that's offers, we've also got systems and we've got tools. Let me touch on systems quickly. This isn't a huge one for solo, for side hustle firms, once you become a solo operator becomes a much bigger deal. But let's hit systems real quick and then we will end on tools. Okay, so this whole framing of, of your systems, your tools and your offers, they are like kind of at the meta level above the machine itself. That is your accounting firm, client gives you info, you do the work work, product goes out, client gives you money. And there's a million different ways to build this machine. And the side hustle stage, obviously it's a very simplistic machine. You're the ones pushing all the buttons, doing all the work ultimately. But to to only be consumed with the doing of the work is a real trap because it's actually everything else that moves your firm forward and, and solves the problem of how do I make this a full time thing, how do I make this work more profitable, how do I get home in time for dinner so my spouse will stop being mad at me? All of that is solved not by doing the work more, but by doing all the ancillary stuff, everything around it. And so your systems are ultimately how you design the machine in a way to consistently deliver outcomes for clients in as efficient a manner as possible. And you may think this only applies to like hiring other people and getting them to do your bidding the way that you expect, but it actually applies to you too, like creating even reasonable work work paper templates. Like there's very basic examples of this, of how investing a little bit of time can make your life easier if you're doing repeated work. The problem is with a side hustler is at this stage you're probably doing all sorts of different types of things. And it's why it's not as worthwhile as it would otherwise be to build systems because every client looks a little bit different still. Once you have like a banger offer and you're pulling in a bunch of clients via that offer, then you have like a very streamlined here are the things that I can offer you. And you build systems like heck around that and you can do, do a high volume, automate as much of it as possible, but we're not there yet. And so when it comes to systems, what to think about and is actually how you are readying yourself and what your role will ultimately be in that system long term. Early stage A lot of us are blocked by education, by what we know today and what we may think that we need to know in order to run a successful firm. And this One's going to be very contextual. Like, if you're coming from a firm where you've already done all this and you could do it in your sleep, that will not be the blocker to your success. If you're first exploring running, say, a bookkeeping firm for the first time, you don't know the first thing about accounting or bookkeeping, then, yes, like, there's a, there's a degree of foundational knowledge that you have to have there. But I'll let you in on a secret. You get non accountants that will come in and buy accounting firms all the time. And is that, is that an irresponsible thing to do? Some accountants, I think, would tell you, yes, I would say there's, there's bad versions of that and there's good versions of that. Ultimately, at the end of the day, if you're building a growing firm with other team members, if you have to be the one to bless every bit of work that goes out the door, then you're inherently going to be the bottleneck. And so this is more of a problem for firms as they're like pushing a million in revenue and beyond. They get to that point where they're like, oh, I can't oversee everything anymore. And so I have to have a level of person in my team that I can trust to be accountable for putting correct, like putting accurate workout. And that's, that's a huge unlock for the firm owner because that firm was probably going to be kind of capped around a million in revenue until they were able to get over that. Now it becomes about, oh, I just need to find the senior people that I can trust to do work correctly. Once I've got those people on my team, then our volume, like, totally opens up. Right. And so for you and the firm that you want to build, and you may not know this yet, like, maybe you're still figuring this out. There's a growing number of people that just want to, like, run a solo firm and just kind of make that as chill as they can and not have to manage other people. And honestly, that's super admirable. Like, to be aware of yourself enough and willing to, like, fight back against the lifestyle bloat and all the things that come with finding success. Like, that's a super admirable thing. And like, accounting is a fantastic profession to do that. And there's definitely a lot of traps there where you can sign yourself up for too much work and you, you deal with kind of that mental issue of, ah, man, it used to be my employer's fault, but now it's my fault. And. And that can be a bummer spot to find yourself in. I would say the greatest gift of running your own thing is agency, is it's nobody's fault but my own now. And as much as that sometimes sucks, I would still trade that for someone else telling me where to be and when. And let me tell you, once you taste the rainbow there, for most of us, you will never go back. Like, entrepreneurship, like, it's. It is like just a level of freedom that is completely different to working for somebody else. And if you're like me, you may have nobody else in your life that understands this, nobody else around you. I don't have a single person in my immediate or extended family who's an entrepreneur who doesn't work for somebody else. And so you go to, like, the holiday, whatever is like, you talk with them about your work and stuff like that. Man, they don't. They don't have the first clue what you do. They're usually concerned. They're like, is everything still going okay? And they, they just struggle to relate to that. And so if, if that's your situation, like, it is only natural for you to be like, man, I. I have no idea what I'm. What I'm getting into here. And it's. And it's scary, and that's, like, healthy. And the more you zoom out, you think ahead and you're like, oh, am I going to want to run a big team? What am I actually going to want to do? The more further out you think, the more stressful that can be. And so my recommendation to you would be like, don't try to big brain this. Don't try to plan out every step along the way. Like, try to take it a day at a time. Because right now, you don't even know what you enjoy. Like, goodness sakes, I. Every 18 months, I'm like, why? I want to go do that thing now? And some of that is fine. And the, the flexibility that entrepreneurship affords, like, lets you do a degree of that. Some of that can be problematic. But so much of this is just like a journey of learning what you like doing, what you don't like doing. Having the, the privilege of even being able to decide, well, I don't want to do that. As opposed to the. In the beginning, where you're like, yeah, I really don't. Don't want to do that. But little Timmy, Little Timmy's, He's. He's got that private school monthly invoice coming up. But we gotta do what we gotta do, right? So you're not gonna know, like, what does the next decade look like? But be mindful enough of the fact that you're, you're building a machine to know that ultimately if I'm gonna pull other people into this machine, I don't have to be like the smartest and best person at every single thing. Cause sometimes a, a trap here, a real like meandering journey can be wild. I went back to school and I got my cpa and, and that was two and a half years ago. And now I'm ready to start an accounting firm. You sure not, you're not any more ready than you were before. You just wasted two and a half years not learning. If you actually want to run an accounting firm now you want to go get a cpa, great, like I got a cpa. But if you're going to educate yourself on, on specific things, know that you will never be an expert at everything. And most accountants, as they go through their career, if you think about the mix of personal development they go through, think about what percentage of that is technical training versus anything else. Oh my gosh, like it is, it's a massive problem. The fact that like everything is about cpe and CPE fundamentally, like with very limited exception, is about technical stuff. When it's like, okay, that, like that one technical training that might apply to a client or two, you know those spec, those are the worst ones that are like speculative where they're, you're like, oh yeah, there's this new thing and I have to go sit through this hour long training and you're like, oh, now I know about it, but it doesn't apply to any of my clients. Imagine investing your time in that versus getting more comfortable with, with writing, like developing better emotional intelligence, like more confidence in how you communicate with clients. You know the stuff that you spend like a third of your day doing. Learn. Learning how to attract better clients who will pay you more for the work that you do. Like reading a hundred million dollar offers. There's an infinite number of things that you could learn and go out and invest in and pour into yourself. But in the early days where you're not going to build a ton of systems because there's so much changing, be mindful of your relationship to the machine. Because if your goal is to ultimately hire people to do the work, then what are the skills that you need to better oversee that machine? I would argue it might not be that technical training. It's probably how do I, like, be a great manager for talented people? The trap here I think is probably just being fixated on the doing of the work when the reality is, and this may be really, really hard to see into right now. If you're doing a side hustle and you're struggling to build it, you want to make it full time, but maybe you're struggling to do so. It may be really hard to imagine this. But I mean, I've talked to who probably over 100 people now in the last couple of years that started an itty bitty side hustle firm and said, I don't know if I can actually do this. And two years down the road are like, well, I'm at capacity. What's next? Like, you will be shocked how quickly that can happen. And that may be unimaginable right now. And that's kind of part of the fun of entrepreneurship is how quickly things can change. But you would be shocked how quickly most people find themselves in a completely different circumstance where if they wanted to, they could hire somebody to do like the bulk of the fulfillment. Their job could be overseeing and training that person to push all the buttons in the machine while you do the other stuff. Now that might sound fun to you, it might not. Maybe you just want to do the work and that's actually what you enjoy about all this stuff. That may be where you're at today. It might change down the road. That was the case for me. There was a period where I actually enjoyed doing the work. And then there's a period where I was like, man, I am out of here. And then I actually went to graduate school, got my MBA and looked more like 10,000 Foot View AD accounting firms. And I'm like, oh, that's actually kind of a cool business to run. I don't want to keep preparing tax returns, but I could get into like the strategy side. And then I bought the firm I was working at, got myself totally removed from client work. It was about a 40 person firm and I found, well, this is super fun for me now. So your role, the hats that you wear, they're going to change over time. Just be mindful of, of what you're investing in yourself. Ensure that it's relevant to like what the future of that machine is going to look like. Only other thought on systems for side hustlers. We spent a whole week on the podcast digging into like building your service library and that is kind of, that is an unlock to help firms deliver the things that they do in a more systematized way. It's not how we present what we do externally to clients because we want to frame that as an offer that solves a really painful problem. But internally, when we get specific about what things we do, it gives us, it gives us a model to like, classify. Well, for John Smith, we do this and this, and for this and this, you can then develop this process to make that thing as turnkey as possible. So where you're headed just to be thinking about, because you're probably not there yet, still doing a lot of different things. Where you're headed is ultimately to have an explicit list of the things that you do for people. And each of those things can have, like, modifiers, but the goal is for 70% of those things to be the same rather than 10% of those things to be the same. And there can be exceptions. Like you can say, like, well, this, this guy's got like Charles Schwab Simple Ira thing, and we got to log into this website and make the contribution like that. That stuff's fine, those detours. But you're trying to standardize as much as you possibly can. So it's just the exceptions that are the outlier. So start thinking in the direction of here are the things that we're doing for people. How do we start maybe wrangling them a little bit? Because that's going to make your life easier. But easier said than done in the side hustle stage. This episode is sponsored in part by Client Hub. It is. It is tech change season when you're. You got to make those hard decisions and a practice management system decision. Oh, that's just about the most stressful tech call you can make. But let me simplify it for you. Comes down to the four C's capabilities, client experience, clarity, and community. When it comes to capabilities, there's a lot of PMs with all sorts of capabilities. They do all the things. But Client Hub, it sets itself apart with two things. Specifically, it's built to support cast slash bookkeeping work with QuickBooks and Zero Integrations. And they're investing in AI with Magic Email replies, magic workflow, and magic answers. It's a lot of sorcery. Tell you what I appreciate about Client Hub. They're like, we're for bookkeeping firms. A lot of PMs are like, we're for everyone. We can do everything Great. And you're like, really? Though Tax audit firms, go away, skip this ad. But if you're doing books, if you're doing advising stuff, Client Hub might be for you. Check out that that linky link right down in the show notes. This episode is sponsored in part by safesendone who helps you automate the entire tax workflow from taking information actually before that from engaging the client. Do an intake clear through delivery, engagement letters, file transfers, organizers, e cigs, tax return assembly and delivery. Now with a new and innovative AI driven gather capability. We actually did a demo video on this that's coming out soon. It is really good. Safe Sense supports CCH Access Pro System FX Ultra Tax Go System Tax Lacert. Don't take my word for it. How's this sound? The average user takes them three to four minutes to deliver a return and 94% of E signatures and file forms come back within 15 days. You know, you know those 8879 sitting in the file cabinet? You know those tinkers. Safe Sense can make that whole lot easier for you. Explore how Safe Sense AI power tools can make your whole firm more productive. Check out the link down in the show notes to learn more. Okay, last thing we're going to dig into tools. I've got some other resources on this that I update very regularly. The way things are looking right now, I'll just touch on this quickly. For tax firms or for bookkeeping firms. If you're a tax firm, got to have some tax software for a side hustler. Almost always the right answer for you is going to be either Drake Tax or Intuit Pro Connect. Upside of Intuit Pro Connect, it's got a really good integration with QuickBooks Online and it's an actual SaaS product. It's the only tax software that is truly a SaaS product. Not a hosted desktop app, but a SaaS product. The rub is Intuit kind of sucks. Not everybody wants to give Intuit money right now and justifiably so. They're like running ads where they'll price match your Tax Pro with like a TurboTax professional. They do bookkeeping services with QuickBooks Live Bookkeeping. So you could be doing bookkeeping for a client in QuickBooks and then when the client logs into QuickBooks they see ads for QuickBooks own service. Kind of weird. So not a lot of people are excited about giving more money to into it. But if you're a side hustler here, your two options are probably going to be Into It Pro Connect or Drake Tax. Now there are tons of other options, but for somebody coming in that's, that's usually what I recommend if you have a wealth of experience with something else like say you're coming from A bigger firm and you were using CCH access. If you want to pony up for that, that like maybe that makes sense for you just because that muscle memory is, is it's a big deal, especially with tax. But that could influence the right answer for you. Most small firms, when they need more complexity, the answer like what I recommend for most is Thompson Reuters Ultra Tax. But that is not a cheap platform and usually not what you start at. That is your tax software. But around that and a tax firm and then we'll move on to bookkeeping is a growing suite of actual like tax workflow software. Some actually some cool new AI stuff. And so the way I think about building your tax tech stack is your tech needs to do six things. It needs to engage clients. It needs to handle intake. That is how you get documents and information from clients. It needs to help you prepare the return that is work papers. And how everything gets organized needs to handle input. That's just your tax software where you're putting it into delivery because delivery can actually be a lot of work if you don't have software to help you and then how you advise. Because advisory work is the most profitable work you can do in a tax firm. Rather than selling a tax return, you are selling tax savings, which is a big opportunity. Again, I got other content on how to build your tax tech stack that's kind of a primer to to get you started. Okay, bookkeeping firms in the US most firms you're either pushing QuickBooks online first or 0Xero. If you don't want to go with Intuit stuff. I know tons of firms, super profitable firms, really smart people running entire firms on Xero like we can. If you don't want to use Intuit products, you don't have to. One sidebar here. Some industries, they have to use like an arcane specific platform due to some special like specific need that they have. And as much as that sucks and it's hard to integrate those platforms and they come with a bunch of limitations that can actually be a really cool business because it eliminates like 98 of competition. When you're like, oh yeah, I know this platform in and out, we can do this really well. In my firm we had this with a platform that was specific to retail flooring stores. They were all on this awful old system that sucked. But they swore by it because the franchisor said like this is the right platform to use. And anytime somebody was looking for an accountant that could serve them on that platform, like we became the go to. And so even if the platform sucks, oftentimes that's an opportunity. And then you can kind of build your own tooling over the top of it as well and like figure out the best ways to use it. Could be an opportunity there to specialize. So you're going to have your core app for how you get the work done. It's like the app inside the machine that helps you handle fulfillment. That's probably either your tax software or your ledger software. The next important piece of tech to look at is what's called your practice management system. That is like air traffic control for how projects are getting done. They'll handle billing, a whole bunch of other stuff. I've got other resources for how to pick a practice management system. Right now. For a side hustle firm, there's basically six options I recommend firm, 360 Taxdome, financial cents, Keeper, Client Hub or Canopy. We can link those options. Wherever you're watching this right now, I've got a tool that'll like give you a single recommendation too, depending on your service mix, that sort of thing. Tech is important. It's a little bit like your systems though, where things are still kind of being sorted out. So all you need to be thinking about it, it's not going to get as much attention as it will later on when you're building your practice. Now, couple parting thoughts, because I would argue that the biggest blocker for side hustlers at this stage in running your firm are not the things that you're doing or your tech or your systems or anything like that. The biggest blockers, they're all right up here, right in your noggin. They're inside your head. So super common blockers for side hustlers waiting for the perfect time. Well, this, I'm thinking the next fall. At that point, I'll be ready and we'll, we'll, we'll be there, buddy. The perfect time is never going to come. There is no such thing as the perfect time. You're never going to reach a day where you're like, yeah, no, I'm, I'm, I feel ready and capable now. I'm at the point where I will have no fears going into this thing. If you're waiting for that day, it's not going to come. It can be really easy to second guess your offer, like what you're putting out there in front of potential clients. You want to be smart about this and put out something good and something compelling, but putting out nothing. As long as you're not doing any of that, you're not learning anything. And like you got to have that stuff out in the wild. It's going to flop. Like the first ten things you do are going to flop. You're going to find the one that works really, really well and then just hammer on that. Like keep running some tests to be like, oh this, would this work better than that? But like you will not get it right. So stop trying to over engineer this thing. Especially we do especially with league lead magnets, like we're scared of like is this actually valuable? So you turn it into this massive production but then nobody will actually consume it because it's so big that they're like I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna do a seven day workshop. I'm not gonna watch a three hour thing. I'll read a one page PDF. But like our, our like insecurity with is there enough value here will cause us to over engineer this thing. Stop second guessing. Just get something out there and see how it works. Analysis paralysis. Accountants, we're really, really good at this, right? Remember that the longer it takes to make a decision, the more time you're losing that you could otherwise be learning. You're not going to get it right. You're just not. And so if we can, if we can divorce ourself of that notion that we're going to nail it on the first try and we're guaranteed to learn something. Like that's what you want to do is optimize for learning, not optimize for, for failure avoidance. Because failure is going to happen no matter what. And then a firm, let's call it firm dysmorphia, it's very easy to compare yourself to other firms, but it's ultimately a trap. So like don't worry about your fees relative to other people. Don't worry about how big their firm is. Like don't worry about that stuff. You're on your own journey. There's probably things to learn. Absolutely things to learn from other people. But don't chase what they're building or what they think is impressive. Or ultimately the cool thing about running your own firm is you can craft it around like whatever it is you want to do. Do I want to work 15 hour weeks and just go play with my kids? There's a version of a firm that'll do that for you. Like make it unique to you. Like that's the cool thing here. If we're building for somebody else, then you may as well go work for somebody else. Like you've fallen straight back into the Same trap that made working for somebody else suck, right? If you're trying to figure out how to make this transition from, like, part time to full time, actually consider asking your current employer if you can go down to part time. It's one of those situations where, again, it doesn't hurt to ask. And oftentimes, if they're going to be left in a lurch, they will take some of you over, none of you. And that may be a scary thing where you're like, well, if I go ask, like, what if they just fire me? I actually think we underestimate the leverage we have. If you work with an accounting firm, if you have responsibilities and you leave, it's a very good likelihood they don't have a plan for how that stuff's going to to get done. So if you could go half time there and that helps you transition to your new thing, that's like the best case scenario. That's really good for you. And if I'm the firm owner, honestly, I appreciate a bit of flexibility there to where we could build an actual plan. I think we assume that your boss is just going to be pissed and they're going to freak out and they're going to fire you or something like that. But there is a. And this is totally going to depend on your boss. There's a more calm version of that where you're like, here's the thing is, I'm going to leave at some point. We could do this in a collaborative way or not, but I would rather not just leave you in a lurch overnight. And if we could do this more, this plan where Maybe I was 30 hours through this busy season, then down to 20, then down to 10, could we do something like that? And then you have time to plan around it. This works better for me. Like, that goodwill, that may be a really scary thing to do. And your boss may just be a total a hole where that won't work. But I think you'd be surprised. Folks with some time to process will be more open to that than you think. Last, especially if this is your first time venturing into entrepreneurship, I shared that like, nobody else in my circle, like family, has any experience with entrepreneurship. And while this agency and the freedom and all that can be super, super amazing, it can also be incredibly isolating. So I can get home or finish a day of work, and my wife is like, she's like, man, you're amazing. You did the best. You did. You did. You're doing a great job. And I'm like, I. I Appreciate that. Thank you so much. But does she actually. She doesn't actually know if I'm any good at this stuff. Right. And I'll tell you what. It wasn't until I went to an accounting conference and I sat at a table with a bunch of other people that did the same stuff that I do that I was like, oh, my gosh. Like, you people understand me in a way that nobody else in my life understands me. And that was such an invigorating thing. I came up in an age, as you probably did in accounting firms, where, like, you don't talk with other accounting firms like they're the competition. Meanwhile, like, there's so much more work to go around than any of us could ever possibly serve. But you have all these accounting firms, like, busting their butts, doing the exact same things in completely siloed ways. We're all doing the same stuff, yet nobody is like, hey, what did you do for that? How did you solve this problem or that problem? That's actually a really cool aspect of small firm running now is you have a growing number of small firms that are perfectly happy to share advice and wisdom with each other. And it is the very best thing that you can do for your firm is find other people running side hustle firms, maybe people running solo firms that are just a few steps ahead of you. Oh, my gosh, those relationships, those are so valuable. They will literally not only like, energize you to be more excited about doing this stuff and feel more confident, but they will literally shave years off of your learning journey. You're not just going to, like, shut yourself in a garage and figure it all out yourself. I was definitely wired to be the person who's like, well, nobody's going to do this like me, and I just need to go and I need to think more, and then I'll solve my problems. Let me give you a shortcut that'll save you, like, a decade. Anything that you think is, like, a new, cool, novel approach. And this. I'm speaking to myself here, too. Somebody's already done it. So your job is not to reinvent the wheel, is to find the person who's already done it, who's three years further down the road, who will tell you the right and the wrong way to do it. Somebody out there already has the answer. And if we can invest the time in finding the person with the answer, rather than burning, like, two or three years doing the wrong thing, that's what you want to do. You want to find that person. And so that's gotten easier now with social media, like, turning up and talking about what you're working on. That's just going to attract folks that are at a similar spot in the journey. You'll make some friends there. There's communities out there. In fact, we had a. We had a side hustle community spring up. Like in the comments of one of my podcasts. We'll link that. Go join a bunch of other side hustlers who are figuring this stuff out on the fly. I run a community. We've got a bunch of side hustlers in there. Finding other people that do this stuff. Especially if you're, like, struggling with confidence and knowing whether you can do this and just having a million questions right where you're like, I'm embarrassed to ask this. Who do I even ask this of? Man, communities are so powerful there because when you're surrounded by other people that are going through the exact same thing that you are, it is so energizing. Like, entirely different level of confidence. And you will all grow faster by, like, sharing that journey together. It's actually super, super fun. Like, that's also the most fun way to run a business like this is with other friends that do the same thing. Being able to share ideas and all that. Like, it's just. It makes it all way better. Anything else you think, and I'd love to hear from you, questions like, whatever you got. Remember that the bulk of what you are going to be blocked on. Like, it is. It is all up here. It's all internal. It's all in your head. Best thing you could do, Take it a day at a time. And honestly, like, running your own firm, I still think it's such a fantastic opportunity. You can definitely get it wrong and then, like, become the victim of the thing that you created. But, boy, we also talk to people. Like, I know folks that are running just the most unbelievably chill businesses. Halftime, like, making several, several hundred grand a year. There's a lot of opportunity there. You got this. Thanks for coming and hanging.