352 How I Built A Great Lead Magnet (And You Can Too!)

I put a huge amount of effort into something that I released for accounting firms recently. Basically this practice management system recommendation tool. And it is like through and through the sort of thing that I push people to do for the vertical of client that they're trying to serve. Create this thing that's incredibly valuable for people that will get folks attention. You're not asking for them to give you money or do all these things for you, but it absolutely puts you on a map just by doing it. And this for me, what we just rolled out, it was an entirely new challenge. I just wanted to share some behind the scenes of stuff that went well with this and stuff that didn't go well with it, but how it ultimately puts me in a place to do even more powerful things going forward. And that, that is why we invest in doing these new things that are scary. And you're like, man, I don't know how to do that thing. You do it because you don't know what's going to be on the other side of it. But you know if you make that investment in yourself, that going to be, it's going to be something good, something that's going to serve you long term. So come on in. We're going to talk about that today. The process of like rolling out this big sort of quasi report recommendation engine. Let's do it. Okay. If you haven't seen it yet, we did like a big PM recommender tool. We can put a link to it in the show notes. Basically it will let any accounting firm go through a tool, two or three minute process and get one single top practice management system recommendation for your firm and then two secondary recommendations for your firm. And if you were plugged into social media at all this last week, most of you, especially the tax folks, likely weren't. Cause we were kind of in the lead up to a deadline, but working backwards. Basically what I did was three days before launching this, I put out a massive list. There's like 36 practice management systems that, that market to U.S. accounting firms, which is just an absurd and unnecessary number. Just stop, okay? Nobody's going to sit down and go through six 36 practice management systems. Right. And that's kind of the whole idea behind this report. As you know, you, you just, if you run an accounting firm, you do not sleep. Like you just, you're perpetually worrying. You have this tech stack anxiety of am I on the right? I don't even know. And the result is you're like always looking over your shoulder like hey, that's that's looking pretty nice over there. Maybe that's better than what I'm doing. And you just always end up wasting all this time and worry, thinking that maybe I'm, I'm not on the right thing. And the reality is, even when you get serious and you're like, we need to find a new thing, where do you even start? Good golly. And who do you trust to give you this information? You just like, skim through landing pages and talk to salespeople. Like, that is not a way to make a, a, an informed buying decision. These days, hopefully most people are building networks online and, and spamming in YouTube comments and on LinkedIn and stuff like that to where they could at least ask a few folks to say like, hey, have you used this or that? Or, oh my gosh, you do use this thing. I'm thinking about, can I pick your brain for 15 minutes? But as you know, it's an extremely overwhelming problem because there are so, so, so many solutions. Opportunity alert. What, what if somebody, I don't know, hear me out, put out a little tool, little report, something like that. That made the process slightly easier. So a few days ago, I kind of started the campaign on social. I said, here's the giant list. Tomorrow we're gonna do a good old Thanos snap and cut this list in half. It's gonna be savage. But what if there was a better way of picking your practice management system? And people were like, yeah, and people were cheering and stuff like that. And the engagement was really good from the beginning on this and it even got engagement on Twitter, which these days, that is an achievement. But I think we had over 100 comments on LinkedIn on, on that first post and did really well next day. Chopped it in half, said, these ones are out. And I was pretty direct with this. I actually did an image that put half of the list on one side and the other half of the list on the other side in red with a red eliminated above it. And people were like, bro, that is, that is savage. But, but here's the thing, and I didn't like, dunk on anybody and I even said in the post, like, there are good people working on these tools, but we got to get down to business. You need to decide on your practice management system for 2025 today. So we just got to look at where is everything at today? I don't care what you've promised you're going to do. I got to make a buying decision on what we've got right now. But this whole, like this honesty Sort of being savage. I couldn't disagree more because what these posts ultimately led to, which, which I wanted, I, I kind of solicited, I said, like, tell me what you think about the tools on this list and what are you using and what do you not recommend people use? Even we're having this conversation now, like, on the playground instead of behind closed doors. And when we put this stuff out there, it is all the thoughts and the feelings that people already have in a more public forum so people can learn from them. Even the software platforms can see what's working and what's not working. But I believe every time we have this conversation, it trends things towards the right tools. It trends things and the conversation at large towards the winners just by having these conversations. And so do people lose from that? Like, by definition, yes, they do. But I ultimately think that more transparency in this process is good for the ecosystem. It is good for the accountants, who is ultimately who I work for, not for software companies. And honestly, I didn't feel bad about it. Like, I don't, I don't think there's. There's definitely a mean way that you could have done this. And there's a lot of software people that do not like me. Like, they just, they don't like me for any one of a number of reasons. I think part of it is they don't like the, like, the degree of control that I have, maybe, or they don't like the notion that I could tell folks something about their platform and it influenced them in a way that they don't have control over. But I'm like, what's the alternative? Like, you're just going to tell us how to feel about your platform. All in all, I think the reason that this, I think the launch went pretty well is this honesty, is that it's a little bit of surprising, honestly, like, whoa, you're like, you're really going out and saying that. And I think that can be done in a mean and not a mean way. And because it, it all ties back to such a meaningful problem for accountants, people want to be part of the conversation, and even brands want to be part of the conversation. This is the sort of thing where if you can find this in a niche, in a group of people that you want to work with, it's a killer opportunity to put yourself on the map because the goal is just to be visible, to be meeting people, for them to know that you exist. These days, honestly, specializing in an accounting firm isn't particularly hard. The hardest thing is getting yourself to Commit to something specific enough. You know, dentists, probably not specific anymore. E Com definitely not specific anymore. The hard thing is just getting yourself to commit to something that will be so specific that someone will stop in their tracks and be like, oh, that dude's little LinkedIn headline is virtual fitness coaches or who was it? I'm going to find it right now and call you out. Talk amongst yourselves. Brian, Brian. Brian Halady. I've never had to say it out loud. Brian, who I know listens to this pod. His LinkedIn headline. I help Ontario based Clio using lawyers make their business dot, dot, dot. Okay, so it's a little too loud. Make their business less taxing. That's a great headline. So that's so specific. That's an Ontario based lawyer that uses Clio is going to be like skirt. This is the person for me, man. That is how you do it. I would probably flip Ontario based and Clio using lawyers like in the the or if you think about the order of that headline. Okay, nerd alert here we come. This is this. These are the things I think about every single day with every little social media post and everything. So here's the thing you get to Brian's LinkedIn headline. It is I help I Ontario based Clio using. Clio's like a almost like a practice management solution for lawyers. Clio using lawyers make their business less taxing. Only note Brian, I'm going to flip Ontario based with Clio using. So it's I help Clio using. I may even pull lawyers forward because if you think of that statement as a funnel and recognize that most people there will be people who will read one word and people that read two words and fewer people that read three and fewer people that read four. I want to filter for Clio using or I want to filter for lawyers before I filter for Ontario based because Clio using lawyers and even lawyers in general can get value from me. But I only work with Ontario based people. So I'm going to put that last. Otherwise everybody that reads three words, here's what they're saying right now. I help Ontario. Everybody that reads four words they see, I help Ontario based. This is how reading online works. Like we are all skim machines right now. The fifth word though, I help Ontario based Cleo. Okay, they saw Cleo and they're like, oh, is this person works with attorneys? Maybe. And it's only at that point that the Ontario part is interesting if they're in Ontario. But if they're not in Ontario, they probably already bounced as Opposed to I help lawyers one option or I help Cleo. At that point we're either grabbing all lawyers or grabbing all Clio users. And in just the first three words rather than having to get to word five and filtering out the anybody, Anybody that isn't in Ontario before you even get to word five. Only on Jason, don't call it daily firms. Would we spend six minutes on that. Right. That stuff matters big time. There may be no more important. This is a bigger deal than your website copy. The 12 words that are your LinkedIn headline right now are the most, the, the best, biggest, most important bit of copy that exists online about you today in 2024. 1 hundo I believe that to my soft nougat core, okay, we are trying to get our firms to a place where we are for a very specific type of person because that is the only way to stand out in this day and age. Not the only way to build a business. You can still build a business on referrals and all that stuff. But what, what are the problems that the Clio based lawyers in Ontario have? If you talk to 20 of them a month, you're gonna be a better advisor. You're gonna be able to do that work more efficiently. And something like, oh, let's go deeper on Brian. What are the things in Clio the most common features people aren't using? Stuff like that, like we talked about this kind of PM tool, what's an equivalent of a PM platform Roundup for dental clinics, stuff like that. You don't have to hold yourself out as an expert. You're just the one willing to do the research. This episode is sponsored in part by by Teamup, who helps you find talented accountants in the Philippines this week and team up, literal stuff that happened this last week. Team up placed their first marketing placement actually into a firm. While a VA and a tax accountant both got offers last week. They have 18 active recruiting projects. And in the last week and a half, they've had one firm start looking for a bookkeeper. Three firms start looking for senior accountants and have had three signed job offers. Accountant, senior accountant and management accountant. Gang is. It's happening. People are doing this stuff because, because it works. Same thing I did. Hired a bunch of accounts in the Philippines. Hired a bunch of accountants onshore too. But man like it is, as I've shared it is how I would build my firm tomorrow. About two offshore hires for every onshore hire. And that gives me the flexibility to grow to where I want to grow to. Well, the reality is like it's very challenging to find onshore accountants. Think about it. I know there's a lot of blockers associated with this, but give it some thought. Team up is going to make it as easy as possible for you to hire people directly in the Philippines. Learn more at the link down 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 Fin 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, 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 information into the email and sends it out. Now I was doing a cache reporting process for my clients. They're 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 in the Show Notes to learn more. So this actually went live today as I'm recording and a few thoughts I had that I wanted to share. 1. So many random tools came out of the woodwork and part of the value for me of putting that list out is everybody contributes and helps make my list better. So it started with like 27PMs and it ended at 36 who are marketing to the US but you know, really funny thing that I, that I see people do that. I, that was a hundred percent me. I was absolutely that guy is. They chime in and they say, how do you not have this? And I'm like first of all, like, is that a rhetorical question? I don't know. I, I don't know because I haven't heard of it. But then immediately it's like well, this thing the best. I don't know how you haven't heard of it. I was, I was so wired to be this guy because I had like the best ideas and I wasn't going to be like every other accounting firm. Like I wasn't willing to settle into that rut because I knew I knew better. The irony being oftentimes when we're in this phase, like you just haven't been exposed enough to know how much you don't know. But what do you think is more likely? That you stumbled into the perfect tool and nobody else has discovered it yet, or it isn't the best tool for the job? Let's just play the probability game. I've been thinking about this a lot with mainstream tech folks too. And this is the main pushback I get on the PM Thing is, what about ClickUp and Trello and Notion and kind of all these other tools? Why don't you recommend using that? I need to go all the way down that rabbit hole because we've talked about that before. Ultimately it is. I did, I put my, my CAST practice, which was about one and a half million dollar practice, I put that on ClickUp ended up coming full circle back to the accounting ecosystem because what I saw there was a rebound from a super restrictive system that drove me nuts. And I looked at mainstream tech and I'm like, oh, it's so cheap, it's so perfect I could ever want and more. That is nirvana. And you go out there and you have a total blank canvas like this is going to be, you know, the ultimate way to express myself finally. And then you're like, holy geez, this is a lot. I need like a, an an X, A platform experts just to keep this thing in shape. And I can't put it on rails quite like I want to because it is so flexible. And then I come full circle, right? Realizing running an accounting firm is not as hard as I make it out to be. It's all about systems and doing the same things and as repeatable way if possible. And so what I want is actually something that will put this on rails for me as much as possible. And the accounting systems in our space are not perfect by any means. No system is perfect. But I will take that over going out and grabbing a mainstream tool that I then have to cobble a few other bits of tech onto to get everything that I need. And they're all best of breed but, but they don't integrate quite like I want to. And then I end up playing software night janitor and having to fix all that stuff and just being involved in a way that I don't want to be. And then when I come back to the accounting ecosystem, I Put the team in charge of that and I'm, I'm out of the software stuff. We've got something that's imperfect but a little more turnkey. And I can just say anecdotally, I've seen a lot of accountants that went through that phase and so many of them that came back to the accounting ecosystem but, but then like, don't go back to mainstream. Like I have seen people go mainstream, but I've seen a huge number of them come back much more than I've seen go the other way and like stay forever. Most of the folks I see at that stage, they're either, they are tinkerers and I was a thousand percent a tinker and I enjoyed building my own system and crafting that. I ultimately grew out of that. It's not to say that everybody will, but eventually I got to the point where I'm like, this isn't the best use of my time, man. Especially when there's a tool on the shelf over there that will get me 90% of the way there. That's what we need to be on and I can even make my team run it. The other big thing that I'm thinking about these days with AI and everything else is there's a, there's a world where we just don't have all that much tech for tax and accounting professionals. And let's say you look at stuff like ChatGPT, which is incredibly powerful and, and will increasingly be able to do more very niche, industry specific stuff just by creating a custom GPT or just telling the assistant to do xyz. It's getting to the point where it will do things that used to only be possible with industry tooling. I don't like a future timeline though where my clients and business owners and everybody has access to the same software tools that I do like. I still want tools for professionals that will make the profession more efficient, that is good for the industry. And as much as I'm a, I'm a small fish and maybe my money won't ultimately make a difference, I would rather pour that money back into our ecosystem and reinvest that and getting better tools for pros than going out and like giving it to ClickUp or Notion or something like that. And don't get me wrong, I absolutely love all those tools. I run my personal life in notion. Like I said, I ran my, my cast practice and in ClickUp. But ultimately running an accounting firm beyond a certain phase is it is about trying to make it as turnkey as possible. And the Tools within our space are a little bit more opinionated where they give you a structure within which to do that, as opposed to the tools that are made to work with any business. Ultimately the limitation I found with them was that I made. Got very hard to put that on rails enough for my team. And people would break stuff and it'd be like, stop messing with this view. And, and they wouldn't use it right. And it's like, well, that flexibility kind of, kind of came at a cost and it ultimately wasn't worth it for me. Another, another thing that you, Anytime you start talking about tech and, and folks are, are they end up really kind of being staunch defenders of the things that they use because they're invested in them. It's absolutely human nature. People are super opinionated about the cars they drive, about where they live, stuff like that, because they have so much financially and personally invested in it. The more invested in it, the more you will come to the defense of it and say, no, this is right. I otherwise, like, I've made such a massive decision, like, massive mistake in my life. Like, you will stand by that and debate it until the end because of how scary being wrong is. Like, that's human nature. And you can see some of that coming in. And the PM discussion. You got a few real stands hanging onto those legacy tool sets. Boy, I just can't get my head around like the legacy, the legacy folks and sticking with them even if they get better. Like, they're so, so far behind the best solutions out there now, and they have been for a long time. And who looks at CCH or who looks at Thomson Reuters or anyone else and thinks, yeah, the next five or ten years they're going to be the ones to crush it? Absolutely not. Are you kidding me? Like, not a chance. Like, you're hitching your wagon to, to a company that is a living organism that will continue to invest in its product. I tell people, like, don't, don't buy a product because of what they told you it's about to become. I think that's a trap because software always takes longer than you think it will. And you never know if a salesperson's giving you the real story or anything like that. But the reality is, like, it still has to be a factor. Is this a company that looks like it's still growing and investing in the product? I just can't see how you could ever think that with Thomson Reuters or any of the legacy providers. It's interesting some of us, and I don't know why this is some of us are wired to stick with like the old guard. Like you have people that are just like mega, mega Microsoft fans and they will just, they will always come to Microsoft's defense. You have some of those Google folks too as well, but I think there's like those are maybe not as many as the Microsofties in our space. And I see that with Thompson Reuters too. Logan, Logan McGrathman. I gave him, I gave him a hard time about this. Like he was using Thompson Roddy's on vo and I'm like, dude, look around. Like there's so much better options. For whatever reason, some of us, like we, we, we gravitate toward to very different things. Not that it's right or wrong, but it is interesting. And I don't know what it is about the human condition that will make one person gravitate towards the really shiny looking startup thing and the other gravitate towards something that is very obviously more traditional and not as progressive. But there's something beyond, I'm convinced there is something beyond like raw capability and features. Like there's something innate to what is appealing to us about tools that is different from person to person. I don't really have my head around that. But surely this is the podcast where we'll figure that out, right? Another thing, I noticed a lack of new prac. New practice management systems. Most of these systems have been around for a while and boy, if you're looking for like new interesting, exciting things, I wish there was more you could put your finger on. I mean, I think the biggest shift the last three, four years has probably been what Keeper has done where they did a really deep integration with the ledger and they're syncing all the actual transactions into the system so that you can do the review from a single place. If there's a new early stage company right now, I don't think they've actually officially launched in the US yet, but Iter AI, uh, that's an interesting one. Part of the AICPA startup accelerator. Basically they, they do the same thing that Keeper does where they do a deep integration with the ledger, but then the whole UI is basically sat atop the ledger and they're surfacing sort of advisory insights and helping you manage the month end close all in one place. Kind of similar to what Keeper has done, but a little more like a practice management system and a little more geared for identifying opportunities like flagging you when it's like you need to go have a conversation with the client about this. We've seen light versions of this in the past where people would other tools would like call out specific scenarios. But this tool iter is almost like a hybrid of Keeper and a practice management system that's a little bit more advisory leaning. That's honestly maybe the only cool new thing I've seen in practice management systems in the last 18 months, which is kind of too bad. If you want an argument for why we need to keep investing in our industry tools because they are still growing, let me, let me take you back to a LinkedIn post from April of 2023. After several months of railing on how practice management systems needed to better adopt AI, Let me call out some of these items for you that we still don't have in practice management systems, but are specific to accountants and are never going to be built into a general platform like Microsoft. Like this is the opportunity of industry tech. It will take us further by doing things that only accountants need that the Microsoft Office suite will never do for us. Search vastly better search. Search deep into documents. Search into meeting transcripts in the email history. It's a hundred percent possible right now. I can go out to ChatGPT. I can create a custom GPT which is like a custom assistant to do a specific job. And you know how many documents of knowledge I can upload to a single custom GPT. And in my $29 a month chat GPT plan to a single custom GPT, I can upload up to 1 million documents. And when I have a conversation with that custom GPT, it will fetch information from those documents. This, this tech is here. I mean it's literally available via API, yet search and practice management systems it doesn't see into tasks, into projects, into emails, into all these different blind spots. Give me a unified search. Next, extend search to be more contextual. What W2s did John Smith have in 2021? Same thing. We've got all this information in the system. If I took all of the data that was in my practice management system and put it into ChatGPT, oh, one could answer this question for me. Now I don't want to make this sound trivial. Like there's a lot that goes into this retrieval augmented generations. Like it's, there's a whole like very technical side to it, but it can be done. 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 I 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 want to do big firm things, Carbon might be for you. Check out the link down the show notes Today's episode is sponsored in part by Lifflow Gang. Liflow launched a new dashboarding platform and I got to have a play with it the other day. It's actually pretty darn cool. They've got loads of templates like they've always had live flow for context. In the past there were utility that connected your qbo, your Xero with your Google sheets, your Excel so that pull any like client data into there. Now they're doing the same thing but for dashboards, bunch of dashboard templates you can swipe with like full blown like a suite like combinations of all these different reports, executive summaries and it all connects to that client data the same way their spreadsheet tool did. So you literally just pick a different company from a dropdown so I can pick like make a cool custom reporting suite looks super impressive and then to like deliver it to another client. Literally as simple as changing the dropdown to a different company and pulling all that live data in a no brainer way. If you're tippy toeing into advisory to put better information in front of your clients. That's Liffel's new dashboarding feature. Learn more Collection link down in the show Notes External search extending that search to go as far as like well we connect this client to the accounting ledger in qbo. Like we have a QBO file for that client in the practice management system. I'm now going to connect the PM to their QBO account. So when I search, it can actually search into ledger information as well. We got a few practice management systems like, like Client Hub is one where they do like a sort of an uncategorized expense thing. And it will sink in uncategorized expenses. So the client can log into the portal and, and help you classify those. But there's nothing to stop practice management systems from setting up this connection to make search even better. Client communication. Generative replies is probably the biggest thing I've railed on. A client sends me an email asking for a copy of a tax return. The tax return is in the practice management system. Draft a reply email, attach the tax return they're asking for. I mean, there's, you think about all the information that's in the practice management system that a draft email response could help with. Probably the best implementation I've seen of this is in Superhuman, which is my favorite email app. What it basically does is for any given email you receive, it will draft three possible responses. So if somebody asks you a question, those three possible responses, it will give you a summarized view that is yes, no, or you know, something in the middle, some sort of contextual response. And it gives you those few drafts to start with so that you literally never write an email from scratch again. You read the email, you say, what will ultimately my answer be? Yes or no or something else. You pick that option and it gives you that starting point. And 80% of the time it's pretty good because it matches your tone of voice and all that stuff. Imagine that augmented with all of the information in my practice management system, it can see into my client's accounting ledger and even answer questions about past activity. This is the potential power we can have with industry tech that like we won't get with with general mainstream tools. So many other things here. Generative attachments. Generative documents. Creating documents like on the fly when they're needed. Renaming your file system to follow a specific like naming convention that you want your files to follow. Summarization, surfacing similar documents. Let's say I'm writing a tax notice and automatically surfaces. Here's a. Or response to notice. Here's a very similar document that somebody else drafted. Sending requests to a client. Check to see if I already have it. I'm in. I'm. I'm setting up a request in their portal and the integration with the AI Meeting Transcript tool pulled in a transcript of a meeting my colleague had with the client yesterday or a phone call or something like that. And they discussed the thing that I'm now asking for. Tell me that's not a hard one. We already have audit tools that do this and the framing of PBC requests. The flip side of that too. Somebody has a meeting with the client, you get an email automatically resolve the outstanding request that is hanging out in the client portal. With that one sentence from the client, I'm I'm claiming my daughter next year, not this year. Like we have that information. There's so many more smart things we can do with it. There's like another 10 things on this write up. Let's all if you're curious, I'll link this in the show notes. So write up. That I did in April of 2023. I said this is the future of practice management systems. I'm disappointed. I've been very nice to practice management systems this last week. At least the good ones. Let me give you a big old punch in the mouth now. Not doing enough. This is ultimately why we need industry tech, but industry tech needs to work for us. All we've gotten is like very basic generative email replies, which is basically the same as what you could do in ChatGPT. Okay, I'm done railing on practice management systems. We had about so it's been five or six hours since this selector tool went out. We've had about 1200 people go through it going forward. What will this enable? This is going to be a killer long term lead magnet. Common trend on LinkedIn right now is is linking stuff, linking external stuff right in the post. Like LinkedIn is letting us do this. Normally social media platforms, if you link something external in a post, they'll be like, I'm not showing that to anybody because I don't want them leaving the platform. But this PM recommender thing, if you think about it for my posts in the future, it's a tremendous lead magnet. Anytime I'm talking tech stack, I can be like, by the way, always start with your practice management system. There's like 35 of them in the US now. But come do this and I'll give you one recommendation in 90 seconds. Like what an awesome lead magnet. And then as part of that, I haven't mandated email capture in this the way it's currently set up. I didn't want to in like the first wave. Longer term I probably will where they have to give you their email address in order to get that recommendation. So if you think, if you're thinking about something similar like you know, as an accounting firm, what a painful problem this is for accountants. What is that painful problem for A client that you would love to work with where you can create that valuable lead magnet. Honestly, like, I could update this thing, like, once a year, and it's solving the biggest tech problem in accounting firms. Not solving it, but helping people take a big step towards, like, a solid recommendation. Right? And so I. I could literally update this thing once a year and then all year, whenever I'm posting on social, a couple times a week, like, whenever it becomes relevant, I can plug that thing every single time. And just think about the difference I will have in email capture by having that versus not having that. And that's the value of just having a few really good lead magnets and the unique place we're in right now where LinkedIn is actually making it pretty easy to integrate lead magnets into your content to improve email capture. Give it some thought. I love the whole, like, writing a report or creating a study or just something very juicy. I think this one was juicy because it was kind of exclusionary and a little bit like Survivor Tribal Council vibes, a little bit Hunger Games. And there's ways to do that that doesn't alienate people, uh, particularly if it is being done in service of the people that you support and the people that you work for. The people that I work for is accountants, not software companies. If anybody loses here, it's. It's the software companies that weren't included on the list. There are software companies that win from this, but in my mind, like, it is like a. An effort to create greater transparency to raise the tides of those who ought to be winning and help accountants quit wasting time on the wrong platforms. Like you do. You do something like this, you'd be amazed how many people are out there who are like, oh, I changed this or that, or I revamped my tech stack or whatever, and they attribute that to you. And you played some role in them doing that. And, like, they will forever have that, like, blip of affinity for you. And that's, that's the value of this. Because something like that can find so many people out there that you've never met that you would never otherwise meet if you didn't make this cool thing that the algorithm latched onto and a bunch of people started speaking into you, starting to build that affinity at scale. Man, that's. That is just so powerful. The main blocker, our main fear is being willing to go specific enough to find the people who will engage with that. I'm able to do this right now for us public accounting firms as a product of, like, honing my craft and building an audience over the last three years. If I was starting today, US public accounting firms would be too broad for me. Nobody would care. I think if I had just posted this today and I didn't have the three years experience, I wouldn't know how to build this stuff. I wouldn't know how to build like excitement around it, how to write the copy. You got to start somewhere. The more specific you start. Even if it brings in three clients, one client, no clients, and then a month down the road you pivot. That's fine. That's learning. That's actually really, really valuable. The only way you don't learn is if you don't do anything. So don't be afraid to give it a whack. You're, you're not going to get right on the first try. But don't be afraid to go really specific. As we talked about this last week in the, in the various podcasts on different stages of firm running. Ultimately, like, the direction your firm is going is a product of how you're holding yourself out to bring in like the next client, one client at a time. Like, that's how a client, that's how a firm is, is reinvented, is by turning over that roster and working with a different type of client. And so you really don't have to think about it any more than any bigger than that. Like, what is the next client that I want to bring in? If you're going to make a big investment in a lead magnet that's going to take a bunch of effort, then maybe you need a degree of confidence that you're going to stick it out with that type of person for a few months. But I think the problem with like niching down and specificity is we, we think it's this forever commitment, this huge investment is literally like, how do I get my next client that's better than my current C and D clients? You can boil it down to as, as simple as that. It's not a forever commitment for sure. If you love it and you do it until the end of time, that's probably going to be a more profitable business. But it starts by just picking up one client that's better than your C and D clients. So you can let a couple old projects go and just pick up that new one. Right. That's all I got for today. Thanks for coming and hanging. Been a busy week. Hopefully you got something of value from that practice management tool. We've got it linked down below. If you haven't had play with it yet. At the very least, my goal for you is if. Even if you are on the right system, is that it helps you sleep at night. Because if you're. If you're like me, you have this perpetual angst about being on the wrong thing. So at the very least, even if you're very confident in what you're on, maybe, Maybe you can just help. You have that much more confidence. So you're like, cool, I can park the bus on my practice management system for the next 24 months. I don't have to sweat it. I know I'm in a good place. That is a gift. Like, that is a really good feeling to have. That's it for today. See you in the next one.