356 Redefine Your Business & Career in 12 Months

Gang. There is in my experience never been a social media platform that is quite like what LinkedIn is right now. The opportunities on LinkedIn are unbelievable. But I still feel like we are blocked by our urge to manifest some like future path that we understand and can plot out one by one. And so many people I've told in the last week or two, just stop trying to take control of everything. There is a better way forward that can redefine your career if you're feeling stuck and completely redefine your firm if you don't know what to do next. So come on in, we're going to talk about that today. I want you to like leave this pumped with some like real action items and motivation that there is something better out there for you. Things that I've heard in the last week. I'm in a golden handcuff situation. I work for Big four. I make really good money, but I don't see really a path up. I don't even know if I want to go up. But I'm not going to make more money doing anything else. Another story, I do such a weird niche thing. I can never find another job like I have now. So I'm never going to be able to go out and find another opportunity. And I can't go backwards and start doing bookkeeping or tax or VCFO work or something because it's not as valuable as the stuff I do today. Third one, and this is probably the most common. A lot of these are from big firm people too. But there's, there's going to be all sorts of examples of this. I'm not in a role that I enjoy today, but because I can't imagine what a better one would be, a better version of what I already do, I feel trapped. I don't know where to go. I don't know what to do. Can you see what we're all, what we're all doing here is we have this almost like not a Rolodex, we have this like database in our head of job descriptions and things that we have seen other people do. And we're like, how do I slot my. I don't see a version of that that I can slot myself into that's going to be as juicy as the opportunity that I have now. And many of these conversations, it's with very high level people, very successful people. Maybe that's not you. Maybe you don't feel like you're there yet but you know, you have an ambition to do something like really impactful gang. There are over 1 billion people on LinkedIn. Over 1 billion people can see the next post, the next comment, the next engagement you make on LinkedIn. How much control do you think that you have over your next opportunity? I'd love to tell you that it's all up to you, that you can manifest the best thing for you. And maybe that's actually an even better framing for it is the best thing for you, the most exciting, most interesting, the greatest opportunity for you. Do you think that you will be able to sit there and come up with that thing in your head and the people that will enable it for you and envision exactly what that could be? Or do you think that the 8. Is it 8 billion people? Or do you think that the 8 billion people on earth, you think across all of them and the different things that they. Do you think there might be a little bit more than we could possibly imagine or try to dream up ourselves? Now to pick through a bunch of these really common blockers. I'm in a golden handcuff situation. No such thing, buddy. I'm limited by X, Y, Z in my contract. No, you're not. Most, if you're an accounting firm, most of those contracts are like total bs. Like, they cannot actually enforce them. They can't keep you from doing that thing. And also, what a way to go through life. I can't do what I want to do because I have a contract in the job that I don't enjoy that keeps me from doing that thing. You just got to get over that. Like that. You just got to get past that, whatever it takes. And the golden handcuffs, it's not about how much you make. It's about. It's about your monthly burn. It's about the way that you've built your life up. And you might be totally reliant upon that money now, but, like, that's a choice and the financial threshold that we need to be happy. If you're in that quote unquote, golden handcuff situation, it's a whole lot less than where you're at right now. Probably it's one of those I want something, but I'm not willing to, like, make the sacrifice necessary to get me to that thing that I want sort of situations, you know, even though you know that that's probably a very temporary sacrifice. I. So whenever somebody signs up to my newsletter, I asked, like, I tell them, send me an email, tell me what you're working on, like what you're stuck on, where you at. And I can't tell you how many people have said I finally went out and started to do my own thing. I wish that I had started sooner. And I'm surprised at how quickly it's grown. So by and large folks like once you commit are usually surprised at how quick, quickly it grows. So if there is an uncomfortable unknown period and there is there like I don't want to make it sound like there isn't. There always will be. It is usually going to be shorter than you expect though. And this is another reason why I think like the side hustle is the way to go. Don't quit what you're doing without a plan, without any other alternative source of revenue like get the side hustle going to a point where it becomes painfully obvious that that is your future and it doesn't feel like quite so much of a risk. That's what I did when I was building content and you know, I have my private online community that I still have of, of accounting firm runners like that grew into an actual business in a way that I never expected. And I could see the trajectory of that relative to the trajectory of my firm, which is a service business that's subject to, you know, some of the constraints a service business is, which an online media business like this is not. I also had kind of the, the inspiration on this side of the business that I can help a whole lot more people. Like this was a really compelling thing that would support a bunch of firms. But like I also had a family. I mean I had, I had three kids under five at the time that I did that. Three kids under five. It was a lot. I was shooting videos in a garage so I still needed to make money. But it wasn't until the side hustle got to a point where it was clear, clear like okay, this will support me or at least very soon will be able to support me. That's when I pulled the plug on the other project. And again, you could circle back to contracts here and non competes and stuff like that. Buddy, nobody is stopping you from posting on social media. You are entitled to be an individual and do what you want to do on your free time. I am so convinced that right now, if you made the commitment to post to LinkedIn every single day for the next 355 days, you would never be short on opportunities again in your life. You would have enough connections, you would know who to go to for certain opportunities. You would have folks that felt problems that are the same problems that you talk about every day where you could help them. And this is the big thing you would have Access to things that you would have never guessed and you would have never been capable of willing into existence yourself. Because our brains are not made to process the volume and the size of the world. Like, our brains are designed to work in itty bitty little tribes. And when we look at LinkedIn, that's what we see. We see little tribes of people who are like however much you can remember at any given one, one given point in time, it's not the entirety of everyone that's out there. It's not the entirety of all the, all the problems and interesting things people work on. Like, if you think what you do is too nuanced to find a place to do elsewhere, it's just absolutely not the case. If you have a role doing it right now like we are, we are not the snowflakes that we think we are. The world is bigger. There are a bunch more people doing the same thing that feel the same way that you do. They may have problems that you can help to solve, but until those people know that you exist, you're going to be on an island. And the whole value of, of being on, on LinkedIn every single day right now is simply visibility, is simply showing people that you exist. Talking about a specific thing which will serve to attract other people that work on the same thing and people that have problems that can be solved by that thing is honestly as simple as that. Now, some places where people get this stuff wrong, because if I told you right now, you would never want for work again, you would be unemployable because you have so much opportunity. If I told you you could do that in the next 365 days and you actually believe that you'd absolutely go out and do that. I mean, this is better than a college education. This is better than any trade school, better than any specific thing that you could learn. You will have a network, you will have opportunities. And from there, gang like, it compounds like that genie never goes back in the bottle. And if you truly believe that, there would be nothing that you put ahead of that right now. But because we want to like manifest our own path and we're doing the ROI calculation, that's a really hard thing to commit to right now. A few ways that people do this wrong because obviously not all social media engagement is the same. It's not all made equal and we bump into a lot of the bad stuff every day. This is particularly problematic on LinkedIn. But my number one tippy top tip for you is be useful. Nobody cares about you. They just don't everybody cares about their own stuff. Maybe there's a few exceptions of people in this world who are not that way. But I can tell you, the people on social media, they don't give a hoot about you, they give a hoot about what you can do for them. In fact, a lot of engagement is just pandering to people who you may want to like do something for you. And I'm extremely aware of that as I've got all sorts of people that want me to promote this stuff. And the amount of glad handing and back slappery that happens in the comments, that's just like trying to build a relationship. While there's a version of that that's fine and not slimy, man. Like this is just a lot of LinkedIn and probably 80% of my feed is people talking about themselves, people talking about how great the company they work for. Is this like thought leadership that isn't leading squat because it's not useful. It's like painting a picture of here's my lifestyle, here's an everyday event that taught me a lesson about B2B sales. Like no, let's, let's strip this down to what is a version of this that's really helpful to a specific person Sometimes I've had periods in my posting to social media where I got a little narcissistic and I got like kind of self important. And the great news is is usually the algorithm tells you when you're getting that way and you need to like get back to something useful and that makes you stop and be like why? Nothing's getting any engagement. It's because you're making it about yourself. And at the end of the day like everybody's concerned with what you can do for them and that's about it. So be ruthlessly useful. I don't know, sometimes I don't go like far enough with the folks who are really into my stuff and want more and want to go deeper. And the reason is because I have that like just laser focus on, I just need to be extremely useful. So maybe there's a point where like you have to create that space for other people that just like want to hang or want to go deeper or something like that. But first and foremost I think the thing most people get wrong is they're just creating noise, not being useful. Today's episode is sponsored in part by liveflow. They just shipped Live Flow dashboards. And if you're looking for a little way to guessy up the monthly reporting that you do for your clients, this is pretty nice. They're like, modular. You can put your own commentary in. Not a, like, giant reporting suite. Not something the client has to go log into. In fact, if you're looking for, like, how to wade into more viable advisory conversations with clients, oftentimes you can only get there if you're giving them information that they can understand and sending them a couple of PDFs of financial statements that is not likely to lead to advisory conversations. They don't know how to make that stuff actionable. The more that they can understand what you're sending them, the more likely it will lead to valuable conversations. Lflow's got a bunch of templates you can swipe to get started. Like, even a P and L dashboard, that's pretty cool. A daily cash movement report. A lot of stuff that if your client saw it, they'd be like, oh, I would like to have that. And from there you then go from just churning out financials to being irreplaceable. Their buddy. And these days, we all need another friend. We all need more buddies, right? I think so. Everybody else. Everyone in the room's nodding their head in agreement. Learn more about Lifelo. Check out the link down in the show notes. This episode is sponsored in part by Client Hub. It is. It is tech change season when you're. You gotta 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 Xero 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. If you're doing books, if you're doing advising stuff, Client Hub might be for you. Check out that, that linky link right now in the show notes number two, engage where the conversation is happening, the conversation that you're interested in. For every post of my own that I make, I'm posting somewhere else 20 times on other people's posts and add value to the conversation. Just don't engage just for engagement's sake. Like, there's a version of that that people do now because they know, like, you commenting on this podcast will increase the likelihood that other people see it. There's a version of that that happens that's like, I don't know, maybe helpful. But, like, where can you be helpful in replies to share your experience or add a resource that was helpful for you reply to someone else's reply. Like, this stuff is built a person at a time. You are not a Kardashian that's doing, like, scale. Like, how do I get a hundred thousand people to go buy this product thing? Like, we're building human relationships and that is point number three. Be human. Like, make actual relationships connect with people. Don't be afraid to send a DM that may end in rejection. I see this in my kids who are like going to all day school for the first time. They have all these social blockers of like, being uncomfortable introducing themselves and asking them if they want to do a play date and stuff like that. And I'm like, man. And we're telling them like, no, you got nothing to be afraid of. It's just a little kid stuff. We do the exact same thing. Like, we never outgrow that. Like, we're so afraid of rejection. We won't put ourselves out there in a way that will optimize for deeper relationships long term. If you are truly optimizing for this, will there be rejection? Yes, absolutely. What do you have to lose? Like, these are Internet people, they are real people. But the upside is much greater than the downside. And the fun thing here is, like, you're actually connecting with people that are interested in the things that you're interested in. Hopefully if you are, if you are going out and having these conversations online every day, it's actually something that you're passionate about and interested in. It's not. Here's what I think a cool business will be because you'll find there, like, that feels like work. Whereas the version of this that doesn't feel like work is the only one that you can truly commit to and actually stick with. So if you're having conversations about things that you are passionate about, the really cool thing is you make friends that are passionate about the same thing. Like, that's. That's awesome. I've met. I mean, it's super early days social media for me. I was talking about a bunch of no code and stuff like that. And I was finding accountants who were geeked on. No code like that was such a unique subset of people out there. I never in my life met somebody who is into that stuff. And so to make friends with that specificity of shared interest was really cool. Last number four, we talked about this last week. Dial in that LinkedIn headline. What's the thing that you're hot about? It is the 10 words out there in the universe about you that are today most important, more important than your website copy. I mean, you think of the number of impressions in fact, Dom, big four, transparency. Dom, he listened to that podcast and posted on LinkedIn and he said, I compared the monthly impressions. What was it? I think it was like he compared the monthly impressions he got on LinkedIn versus his website or something like that. And it was like, yeah, no way. More people see me every day on LinkedIn than. Than anything else. And that's like the most important headline you can have for yourself. Doesn't have, like, don't make it super businessy or I guess don't make it super. Like, don't make it a transactional. Make it very specific to the things that you're talking about at that point in time because you, like so many people, see that every single day. And if it's like, like the example we talked about last week with Brian, working with Clio, using lawyers, like lawyers that use that software, like within five words. That's so much specificity. Where I always use the analogy of like, how do you write a book that's so specific it would stop you dead in your tracks? Perfect book for the person that is blocked and wants to go out and start their own bookkeeping firm for veterinary clinics. Like, what's the very specific book cover that in a bookstore would make you stop in your tracks? That's the specificity that we're looking for, where if they see that LinkedIn headline, they're like, oh man, that's me. I'm into that stuff too. Or I have that problem. I'm going to engage with them, I'm going to follow that person, whatever it is, optimize for that. Because over a longer time horizon, it actually does make a huge difference. Like AB testing, we don't talk about enough. It makes a massive difference. Just a little bit of copy or how you describe yourself. It makes a huge difference, the type of person you attract and whether you attract them at all or not. And then if you consider the compounding impact of that over months and years, whether people decide to opt in or not, it makes A really, really big difference. And the single biggest thing you can optimize. Here is your LinkedIn headline. This is hard advice to give because usually advice is like super actionable, super practical. Here is the step by step of what you want to do. We kind of expect that from advice like a clear framework and this is almost like anti framework advice. This is go play in the world's biggest playground where opportunities will be presented to you that you couldn't otherwise plan. So like the whole notion of being able to manifest the very best thing for yourself requires even knowing what the best thing is. And I would argue that at the end of your life, if you look back on all the things that you've done, the very best things that happen in your life were a product of serendipity. The reason I met my wife was like this random connection that my brother had. He lived in Seattle, I lived in Portland. We weren't even anywhere near each other. Total happenstance even. The reason I got into accounting, I was man weekend weekends at the cafeteria my freshman year and college were the best. We had intramural, intramural football in the morning and then we would just absolutely go ham on breakfast at the cafeteria. So I'm waiting in line for, for waffles because they had like the, the giant syrupy like strawberry slurp just. It was like a hotel breakfast basically. And then you got the little flip over waffle thing where when you open it up and you actually have to like a waffle that's been torn in half is one of those pile of strawberries on way too much whipped cream. Anyways, I'm waiting in this waffle line. Somebody's talking about accounting. I have zero interest in accounting. And by the end of the conversation I'm like, no, that actually makes a lot of sense. That's pretty smart. Not really having a lot of fun in the computer science stuff I'm doing right now. Maybe I should explore that. That is literally what led me to doing accounting. Like there's so many examples of that in my life and I think most of the best things that happen to us you could not have planned for. So by extension, you know, people talk about like your surface area for luck. I would argue the best thing you can do is like be visible, be out there, talk publicly about the things that you're into. And I'm so convicted that that is going to lead to something even better than you could have ever possibly manifested yourself. Maybe I'm using manifestation wrong because manifestation like that is a real thing. Like thinking and trying to visualize and get to that thing. But oftentimes, if we like, have our hands so tight on the sort of cosmic steering wheel that we're just trying to dictate everything that ever happens to us, we're missing out on the greatest opportunity of this age, which is putting yourself out there and, and finding things that you never otherwise could have exist that you love. I mean, you're talking to a freaking accounting celebrity. You want to talk about things that you didn't know would be a business and were even a thing. I found the only thing worse than being an accountant to explain at a dinner party, if you do something very niche, very specific. The really cool thing about the way the world works now is algorithms enable finding a level of specificity that heretofore was totally impossible. And the world's still recalibrating to that. Honestly, most accounting firms still run the same way. They're still afraid to niche, let alone micro niche in a way that the Internet enables. I think we're starting to see this more with, like, communities online of people with really, really specific interests where you never would have met the people with this specific of interests in real life. But now, like, Internet communities can enable this, you know, in person stuff in the past kind of enabled this level of fandom. But not everybody can actually get up and travel for those things. And an Internet community as is as simple as finding like, wow, here's a group of people that were super into this specific generation of GI Joe figurine. Like, that stuff exists now for the first time. But on the business side, I don't think we've acknowledged that. I don't think most small businesses have leaned into that enough. Anyways, if you're feeling stuck, if you want to, like, enable that serendipity, man, like, it is as simple as making a habit of being out there. Like, I would challenge you. Like, take this seriously. I am 100% convicted that if you go out, you post on LinkedIn every day for the next 365 days. You be a good human, be helpful, be useful. You don't do it to chuck up a post and then walk away and then look back a week later and say, how many impressions did I get? That's not what it is. It's like, it's like building human relationships. Turn up and do that for a year, you will never again, for the rest of your life, be short on options of what to do. It's still going to be up to you to be happy and make hard decisions about what to stop doing, what to start doing. But boy, would I trade that, that abundance of opportunity and options for the limited little things that I see. How do I start a bookkeeping for a tax firm? What are the people in my personal network right now like? That is just such a vastly bigger world of opportunity than the one that we will live in if we don't do that. Okay, do it, man. If you're going to do a drop comment down below, maybe we'll like get out the one year anniversary cake on Jason. Nope. Jason on Firms. Close one. Almost said it. On Jason on Firms. Episode 960. Whatever it would be, it's totally changed my life, obviously. And I think people see me now and like the production value and all that stuff and they're like, well, I can see why it works for him. But that just. That wasn't me. That was never me in the beginning. The best time to start was yesterday. The second best time to start is today. Thanks for coming and hanging. I'll see you in the next one.