358 How To Launch An Accounting Firm WITHOUT Tax Expertise

Can you launch an accounting firm without tax expertise? Yes. Yes, of course you can. Oh, there's so many different flavors of accounting firms, and we get stuck on like the average, what the average small firm looks like. But you know what? All the small firms are trying to escape average. They're trying to escape being just like everybody else. So what are the things that you are uniquely skilled and talented, motivated to do? Oftentimes this question is coming from big four people who like, feel like they have this, like, I have golden handcuffs because I have this great role and I make so much money and I just don't know how much. I don't know how I'm ever gonna make that much money doing my own thing. You know how much money your current employers make on the thing that you do? There are so many people out there that you can help who have the exact same problems as all the folks that you're doing work for right now. So we're gonna run through a few, like, practical tips for how to hang the proverbial shingle. If that's what you want to do. Go out and do your own thing without needing any sort of tax expertise, without having to go out and learn something new. Because that's, that's usually a trap. The whole notion of like, oh, I'm gonna go out, I'm gonna get my cpa, I'm gonna go do this or that, and in a couple years time, I'll be ready, gang. If you know that this is what you wanna do, the time to do it is now. Any other blockers, anything like that? It's procrastination. So how do you start taking steps today to get you to the place that's going to be better? Because you know the thing that you're on right now, that ain't it, that's not what you need. Come on in. Let'. Okay, the obvious answer here is like, do people run bookkeeping firms? Yes, people absolutely run bookkeeping and accounting firms that don't do any sort of tax. But I'd say more contextually, the people I get this question from are like, I do audit or I do it consulting or like internal control stuff. I do something maybe a little more. A little more arcane, a little more specific in the context of a larger firm. And you think that to go out and do your own thing, you're gonna have to learn to use QuickBooks, which when oftentimes, like when you have a very specific capability that you've learned in a really contextual situation. That's a great asset that everybody else doesn't have. And if you try to trade that in for doing the normal stuff, then you're putting yourself on a level with all the people who don't have that contextual experience that you do. So how do you wield it in a way to attract super valuable clients who will pay better for that, more contextual expertise. And the problem for, for most of us is that the world just doesn't know that you exist. This is the biggest blocker for folks. Going out and doing their own thing is like client acquisition in the beginning. How's anybody even going to know that I do this stuff? Like the old, like, go out and talk with friends and family sort of thing. You know what we have in 2024 that man, people didn't even have a decade ago, at least not in the form that we have today. We have incredibly powerful contextual social media algorithms that will let you go out and talk about the weirdest little nuance specific thing. And if you do that consistently enough, it will attract the people with similar interests with similar problems. This isn't the Kim Kardashian version of social media. This is the nerdy, the nuanced. You know, think about the incredibly nuanced Internet communities that exist out there for people of like, amazingly specific interest groups, like stuff that they're into. The same thing exists for every single business problem out there and every little niche, sub niche of a sub niche. The biggest thing that the Internet enabled for us is to go more specific into the ways that we can serve people than ever before. Back in the old days when it was like you'd rock up at a chamber meeting and There was like 10 realtors there and two dental clinics in town, so I couldn't have a very big book of business. Right, so what is your plan for relentlessly shouting at the world, I exist. Come buy my wares. I've been full time doing content for almost two years now, pumping every social media platform there is. Two videos a week on YouTube, a daily podcast for over 350 episodes, and you know what happens every single day? 20 to 40 new accountants find me and will send me an email. Oh, your stuff is so helpful. Thank. Just found your stuff. Like, this is so great, this so awesome. And as soon as I stop turning up, those people aren't going to find out about me. Maybe to a lesser degree because I've got like a big backlog of content. But like, evolutionarily, our brains just really aren't made to understand the way that the world works. These days and how specific and nuanced the problems we can solve can be that we then build a killer business around. I alluded to this in the intro, but if you fall into the trap of going out and doing what every other small accounting firm does, you're actually doing what they're all trying to escape. They're like, how do I get to something better where I can trade the same volume of inputs for, you know, someone who will pay me twice as much? How do I solve a more specific type of pain? And if you're coming in with a specific type of expertise, that's gold, like you're already ahead. It's just a matter of finding the people who, who will pay you for it. Now we did an episode, in fact, let's link this in the show notes a couple weeks ago that was kind of like my guide to how to build a side hustle, practice. Because that's the way to start. This is not going full yolo and cannonballing into this, which, which can be a temptation and is absolutely the mistake that I would make because I have so much enthusiasm and energy for it. I'm like a rip up every source of income I have, man. I'm going all in on this. Burn the ships, I don't care. We're going to make it work. And maybe that works for you, but that's not the move for most people. Most people, you start doing this stuff on the side and, and build it to a point where you're relatively confident that you can replace your income, you know, within the next 12 months or something like that. Honestly, what most people end up doing is growing way faster than they expect. But the big risk with cannonballing in is you take on a bunch of bad work because you got to do whatever will pay the bills in the short term. And there will be a degree of this no matter what you do if you're starting a new firm. But the more, I would say the more leverage you have. Like the more of a Runway you have, the smarter you will be about how you take in work. So it's worth considering that now there's going to be all sorts of blockers here from. I can't, I can't do that in my contract. And what if this person or that person sees and all that? You got to get over that stuff. I mean, most of this, the like non compete stuff like that on contracts are completely unenforceable. But all of those blockers, they were designed to make you stop doing exactly what you're trying to do. But if you never do that thing, like, there is no path to escape from what you're doing today. Maybe you do actually have to like, be out of that job entirely to start promoting what you're doing online and all that stuff. And maybe that means taking kind of a bridge role. That's maybe not something you super jazzed about, but will. Will get you there and kind of fill that, that window of time. But it's one of those situations where it is, it is easy to put your finger on all the reasons why you can't do it, but the fact remains that the status quo, that's not going to work either, Right? So something's got to change. You will never look back on what you're doing now and be like, I wish I would have done that longer. No. Like, almost everyone that talks about going out and starting their own thing, they're like, I wish I had done it sooner. Like, my, my sort of arc of growth would have then been sort of accelerated. Pull forward. I wish I had done it sooner. And I wish I would have known how not ready I felt when I started. That's just how it is. And the more you wait, the more you're deferring that learning. So how's the world going to know that you exist to build a firm that's not like your traditional run of the mill accounting firm, first it requires that. A degree of market leverage that nobody has in the beginning. Most people don't come out of the gate with a bunch of raving fans that are like, oh, you just, you can open your own doors and do this. Please take my money. Like, that's not the reality for most people. But this is both the goal on day one and the goal on day a million is how do I build the most market leverage possible. You have people out there who can charge. I can't remember the guy's name, Bill something. That narrows it down, right? Who will charge $100,000 a day for consulting. And people have to come to him at his house in Arizona. That's it. That's the only way that you can work with them. And you know why people do that still? They think it's worth it. Is it worth it? I don't know. But if they are like, ponying up and paying that, then yes, it is. So you ultimately get to make the rules on how people engage with you. And it is all a product of how much people perceive you to be like, the only provider of this solution, how much of a relationship they have built with you and how convicted they are that like, oh no, you are going to be the one to solve this problem for them. Whether it's boring, I mean, whether it's bookkeeping, whether it's audit, whether it's more like it, infrastructure related stuff, the more people have built a relationship with you or consume the content that you've created, the more that they understand your expertise, the more they're going to be willing to pay and like, can't imagine having to work with anybody else. And the great thing about all those people like you who are stuck under their contracts doing that role for all sorts of different firms around the world, because a load of people have problems like these, problems that you're able to solve for. The great thing about those people all being stuck in their contracts is they're not having those conversations on LinkedIn every day. Probably like you could be if you went out and you posted about this stuff every day for the next 365 days. You will never be short on opportunities the rest of your life. And there's no other bigger opportunity than that in the world right now. There just isn't. You can't go to school for 12 months and someone assure you you will never be short on opportunities again. Whereas LinkedIn, the relationships you will make, the connections that you will make that you wouldn't otherwise be able to will into existence yourself. Just by turning up every single day and being consistent, talking about specifically the skills that you have and the problems that are related to it and kind of novel solutions to common problems like having those conversations every single day. And then the power of social media algorithms to attract people. Like every post and every, every comment is kind of like a lighthouse where it's gonna attract the people that talk and think and struggle with similar things and just turning up and being relentlessly helpful there every single day, you're gonna build market leverage just as a product of being visible. And oftentimes we block ourselves by thinking, I'm not enough of an expert yet, or I haven't actually gone out and just done it for people myself yet, and we're afraid to kind of hold ourselves out there. The reality is just doing it. Like that process of having those conversations, that is what makes you an expert. And I would argue you by having conversations in public every single day and putting out into the world things that people can offer feedback on and share their own personal experiences on, you're gonna grow at a rate that is much faster than the same person doing the exact same work behind closed doors. So who's the real expert? The one doing it with, like, no level of kind of peer feedback or reviewer. The one that's doing it in a very visible, transparent way. I talk about running accounting firms every single day. And you know how many people disagree with me? A whole lot. And oftentimes they're right or they have a different lived experience than I do. So they fill me in on this blind spot that I may not be aware of at all. But you know who stands to gain the most from that? Me. Because for every time I put something out into the world and 100 people offer their feedback on it, my mental framework for how my idea, that notion works in the world for not just me, but for everybody else, gets better. It gets refined. And so by. By like, pulling that cosmic slot machine every single day and engaging on social media, I'm learning at an unbelievably fast rate while being visible and while, you know, impressing other people with my expertise and all that. And that's ultimately how you build leverage within a very specific domain to attract people to come and work with you. Today's episode is sponsored in part by Live Flow. 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, 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 because 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 LifeFlow. Check out the link down in the show notes. Today's Episode is sponsored in part by Finn Daily. Man, there are like so many powerful tools now that can automate some adjacent services to what we do. I'm a big advocate of not being in the business of just selling more bookkeeping or just selling more tax prep, because that's usually where we're most constrained. It's the work that's the hardest hire for. Rather find a specific type of client with adjacent needs where we can build adjacent services that don't have this, like, commoditized value that's easier to hire for, that's easier to automate. Fin Daily, fantastic example of just that. It's actually an app that I founded later Soldiers that was built just to automate the cash advisory services I was providing to my clients. We started doing bookkeeping, then we got into bill pay. Then we learned that if we do bill pay, we had a great understanding of their cash. And this cash reporting made all that other, like, work worth it. We can make more money on the cash reporting than all the other stuff combined. And it was way easier to automate. I did that with. Fin Daily is a super cool tool if you haven't seen it before. Learn more about that one at the link in the show notes. Now, as you're doing that, my second tip here. Focus on building the relationships. There's. I think we still think of social media as like a numbers game and doing too much. The social media posts, like the approach to social media that gets a hundred impressions per post in a very, very specific way, but people will engage with it. Like, 100 impressions is like, that's almost impossibly low. But you get the idea. The version of social media that that is for a tiny, very, very specific audience oftentimes is the most valuable one that you can do because you know how many clients it's gonna take to change your life? Not many. Especially if you're doing small, very specific thing. I mean, you may have a client list of five people and you may be able to make, you know, 3x what you ever made before and have this just like, amazingly flexible lifestyle. So why are you posting general small business advice and trying to hit a million impressions on this stuff? Like, just don't like, that's not the point. The more specific you can get in how you talk about this stuff, the lower the bar is for how good that content has to be. There are people out there ready to have conversations about everything and more of them out there than, like, our heads can kind of get around. So find a very specific conversation to have and the fun thing about that is it leads to actually, oh, I remember that person. And, oh, we talked about this last week. And actually building human relationships. When you do it on the scale that we do, like a very small scale, that stuff bleeds over into dms, into hanging out in real life at a conference, that sort of thing. How you convert engagements and comments into like, who's going to be willing to send the first DM to like, hey, you want to hop on a zoom call to like, hey, what you're saying actually makes sense for this other person. Can I make this connection for you? Like, the skill of bridging a social post and social interaction into real business and real relationships and making friends and even fun stuff like that. That skill is what ultimately makes social media worthwhile. There are YouTubers with over a million subscrib that cannot turn that into a business that will pay the bills. They still have to have another job. Which is mind blowing, right? To think that that many people can be influenced by them and, and consume that stuff. But it's like, well, brands don't see the value in the audience. They're not able to ultimately like, deliver something that solves a meaningful problem for their audience. The whole other end of the spectrum is stuff like what we do where it's, you know, very valuable problems that we're solving that are blockers to organizations being able to run more profitably and the perceived value of what, like, it's just a very premium thing. And so you don't need, you know, a million subscriber YouTube channel. In fact, I went full time on just doing content and sold my $40 million. It's not 40 million. Sold my 40 person accounting practice, about a $5 million practice. I sold that, I think when I had like 5,000 YouTube subscribers because I saw a path to like, oh, this is actually a business. Like, funny enough, it turned out to be like a legitimate thing when it started as kind of a fun thing. And likewise for me, it's grown into something that I could have never imagined. And maybe likewise for you, if you're like not the traditional accountant coming into a firm, you're thinking, what box have I seen that I could fit into? And I actually think in 2024, that's a trap. Like, if you're trying to look like everybody else, you're missing the point of what's possible these days. I mean, you're talking to a freaking like accounting social media person. Like, what even am I? What do I do? I don't know. But I can tell you that I enjoy it and it scratches more of the creative itch that I enjoy than running an accounting firm did. Now, if I wasn't doing this, I would still be doing that stuff because it's kind of my only skill. But the point is these days, I mean, accountants are so in demand. Like, you have the power to sort of make up your own thing along the way, but the blocker for most people is they're just not out there being visible, talking about what they do. So find a way to build market leverage by like being out there every single day. Focus on building real relationships. And particularly if they are like, hub people within the space. Like, if there's a consultant that works with a bunch of folks in the space that you're exploring and they already have a bunch of those relationships, like, man, find a way to be useful for them because they'll make all sorts of connections for you. Number three is if you're coming from something else, resist the urge to put yourself into the box. Kind of like what we were just talking about. If you have a premium set of skills, don't come down to the stuff that everybody else can do, like bookkeeping or even tax. One other thought on the whole golden handcuffs thing. Oftentimes you will build up your lifestyle in a way that maybe makes it hard to change what you're doing. This is another argument for like a side gig approach. But, like, let's also be real about what's needed and what isn't needed in this situation. Usually you are far beyond the level of means. That's like actually contributing to happiness in a meaningful way. And sometimes the best thing that you can do here is explore, like, what actually is a really, really stripped back version of getting by and would I be totally fine with that? There's going to be things that make that harder, like you got kids in private school, you got a big mortgage, stuff like that. But I would push back on the notion that what you make today is necessary because, and this is a very, very privileged thing to say, but most people that are in this situation where they're like, I'm never going to be able to make enough money doing this other thing, which, which if you actually unpack that is like nuts, right? Of course you can make way more doing that thing for the same reason that your current employer gets paid way more than what you get paid to do that thing. But this whole golden handcuffs thing is more of a lifestyle burn thing on the cost side than it is your income, I think. So be willing to challenge that because you can make a lot less money and be a lot more happy, and you can make a lot more money and be a lot more happy. But what you know right now is probably not going to be happy doing the same thing that you're doing until the end of time. Number four, you have an opportunity here, especially if you are investing in your visibility online to build things that are more scalable than just traditional services. So is their path into doing like digital products one to many services, a community of folks who have a problem that you can solve, or maybe you can bring them together and there's value for them and having those peer relationships. This is another example of getting sucked into maybe the trap of what the default is for accounting firms, which is selling tax work or selling bookkeeping work. When ironically for bookkeeping and tax firms, the path to running a more profitable firm is actually not selling more bookkeeping and tax work, it's selling the adjacent stuff around that, that clients will pay really, really well for. If there's anything that's been commoditized in the accounting space, it's probably bookkeeping first, it may very well be tax next. But like the price people expect to pay to get a tax turn done or a month end close or something like that, there's a lot of pressure on that because a lot of people do it. But if you think about the nuanced problems a specific type of entrepreneur has that surround that the price for those surrounding things are not as set as the core services. Yet what do we do as accounting firms generally just play yaya ding dong, just sell more of that exact same thing. We're a tax firm, so yeah, we're just gonna sell more tax returns. We're bookkeeping firms, so yeah, we're just gonna sell more bookkeeping rather than finding the adjacent service that's easier to staff, that's easier to automate that a client will pay top dollar for because there isn't the same availability of providers for that adjacent thing. And so if you're coming at this from a different angle where you're not coming in with traditional service delivery, don't get sucked into like the traditional notion of how you support people necessarily. It doesn't mean that you can't work directly with people in like a service business context. But is that the only way that you can help people? In most cases there's other things that you can do. Newsletter that you run sponsors on, I don't know, like paid social media posts, like almost more of a, an element of a creator business, like wrapped around a firm. I actually think that's kind of growing right now. That trend, the notion that you have almost a creator in residence, that is the person that's attracting people to the firm, and it's almost this hybrid of a creator business and a firm that probably sounds super foreign to you if you're like, I'm not an influencer man. Main point is, like, don't fall into the trap of just selling the same old thing, because it's what you see every other accounting firm sell. Consider if all the people like me in that space could get together in like a community and share ideas, would that be valuable? Would they pay to be there? If there was like a $500 course or a $5,000 course that I could sell that would take clients through this sort of transformation, would that be worthwhile? What if we ran a few cohorts a year and five or ten people sign up to it and like, that's not a bad gig at that point. There may be something like that adjacent to traditional service business type stuff that can make sense for you. This episode is sponsored in part by Mercury. Hey, you know where my money's sitting right now? Sitting in a Mercury bank account. Look at me chilling the dog food that I eat. Mercury today is loved by over 200,000 customers. Does business banking that is transformative. Corporate debit cards, credit cards for expense management, free wire transfers, treasury yielding over 5% interest on idle funds. But Mercury for accountants, that's you lean in. It's their new accounting partner program which wants to get you your time back and drive client value. This is cool. They got this thing called Panorama. You can actually see a whole bunch of client accounts in a single view. So you don't have to like drill into all these different things or log in and log out of umpteen different accounts. Panorama. That's right. That's. What a great name. Plus they get all the cool features that you do if you use Mercury banking Bill pay, custom approvals, invoicing, document upload, GL code mapping, reliable integrations with QBO 0 Netsuite. Everything you need to make those accounting workflows sing. To learn more about Mercury, head over to mercury.comaccountants to learn more about the Accountant channel. Or check out the link down in the video. The show notes the words under the thing. This episode is sponsored in part by Client Hub, who I recently named one of my top practice management system recommendations heading into 2025. But according to ClientHub, when it comes to Pickett PM it comes down to the four C's capabilities, client experience, clarity and commitment. Community. Today we're talking client experience. The biggest blocker to like getting stuff out the door with clients is waiting on them. Them not following through on what I need. Which is what makes ClientHub a really unique client experience. It's basically like a two sided task management system. You're doing your work over here, clients doing their work over there. It actually looks largely the same the two sides of that system. This isn't like a portal that they bolted onto a task management system after the fact, which is what most PMs are. Client Hub was built for the client experience from the ground up since that's what's going to make you more productive, a better client experience. If you've been unhappy with that side of the systems that you use today, ClientHub might be a great fit for you. Learn more about that one. Check out the link down in the show. Notes last. And this is. I always try to bring this up if you're blocked on, like, should I have to be able to provide this other service? Like if this is something that you're blocked on most of the time you can still offer that other service via some sort of partnership. There's no shortage of tax firms out there, right? So if your firm is truly blocked by being able to offer tax or bookkeeping or payroll or audit or whatever it is before, like going through the monumental task of building that in house and doing it all yourself, find somebody that you can partner with to deliver those services, like that is the quickest way to validate the assumption that that's a thing that you actually need. If you don't have tax expertise, the shortest path to running a successful accounting firm is, is not hitting pause and developing tax expertise, which you know this like it kind of goes without saying. I think that's where people get stuck is they're like, boy, I wanna do my own thing, but I really don't wanna burn the next three years. Like having to develop this expertise, it's totally the wrong thing to do. And oftentimes you go down that path and you're like, oh, turns out I actually don't really enjoy this, or I'm really bad at this. And now you're double trapped. You're like, well, I just spent three years learning this stuff and so I better keep doing it because I just invested all that time. It's just kind of like stuck on top of stuck. If you truly think that you need that thing for your firm, find a way to pull it in from a third party. And if it actually does turn out that it is essential, maybe it makes sense to build it in house. It doesn't necessarily mean that it needs to be your expertise that delivers it directly. You can hire people, you can keep rolling with the same partnership, but at least start with a partnership rather than building that whole thing from scratch and finding that like, oh no, all I had to do is actually like promote what we do for another year or so and now people will happily come and pay me just to do audit or IT consulting or, or whatever it is. The number of people right now who are sitting in a role that they don't enjoy considering going out and getting a CPA or some entirely new type of expertise that they don't have right now, when there may be something that they do right now that they actually kind of enjoy. They just can't put their finger on other firms that do it. They can't see someone else building a small firm around that. The reality is you can build a small firm around anything. All the same people that are being served by bigger firms, oftentimes in more contextual ways, they have the same problems actually them and way more businesses that you're just not familiar with yet. And yes, there are situations where General Electric wants a big four firm to come and do that thing for them. So they're not going to pay you working off the back of your truck tailgate to come and do the same work for them. Right? But this is where simply talking about the problems that you solve for and the skills that you have attracts a myriad of people and companies that you wouldn't have otherwise knew existed to that thing that you are uniquely capable of doing. Because for every GE that needs a big four to do that thing, probably a whole bunch of people on the flip side of that equation that are like, boy, it would sure be nice if I didn't have to have Big four do this for me. Like, is there a more personal version of this, a less expensive version of this maybe? And as long as you're in that big four seat or whatever it is, you're not going to know that those people exist. Right? I find that people have varying degrees of agency around how much they think they're actually in control of manifesting the role and the firm that they want to run themselves. And maybe I've just been super red pilled to this because social media and all that has changed my life the last three to five years. And every time I say that like, people immediately jump to comparison. They're like, I can never do it as well as that guy can. And the only reason you say that is because you didn't see what I was doing in the beginning. Cause it was every bit as bad as you would expect. I've produced over 500 videos in the last two years. And so I've got a muscle memory and a whole bunch of capabilities that I didn't have 500 videos ago. But the product has been like, I'm out there in a way that I never was before. I have access to a lot of really cool opportunities. I've met a lot of amazing people along the way. And so I'm just. I'm very, very convicted that it's ultimately up to you to, like, manifest whatever that looks like. That firm, that collection of services, the stuff that you enjoy doing. We're in a world that's been made big enough by social media that just about any version of that can be done. If you turn up and you reliably have that conversation or consistently have that conversation, so that anytime somebody goes looking for that thing, they're gonna stumble upon your YouTube video, they're gonna start seeing your posts or your comments on their social media feed, because you're the one talking about that thing. And the more specific it is, the less prolific you have to be. What I started talking about on social media was no code stuff for, like, bookkeeping. Very, very specific. And then I made some friends who were kind of geeked and into the same things. Over time, as I've gotten better at this stuff and the production value has gone up, we've zoomed out a bit, and that's just kind of the natural progression as you do content, because the bar gets higher the more that you zoom out. And so in the beginning, you start very, very specific. And over time, if you want, you can start zooming out. But that's ultimately how you get some eyeballs on what you do, how people learn that you exist, how you build a little bit of market leverage so you can get paid really, really well to apply your specific domain expertise, rather than slink into, like, the lowest common denominator of the things that all accountants can do, right? Like, that's the trap. That's what you ought to avoid. So no tax expertise. By all means, if you want to get into tax, go learn tax. I did tax for 10 or 12 years. I wasn't particularly good at it. I enjoyed running a tax firm, but the actual doing of the stuff, I kind of got burnt out on it. But if you want to do it, by all means. There's plenty of tax work to go around right now. But unless you are yearning to do tax work, find a way to build something around the expertise you already have. Especially if there's something there that is like a passion of yours that like the big, the big competitive advantage that you can have is what is the thing that you are interested in that you can do that doesn't feel like work, but will feel like work to somebody else? Because those things that you're really passionate about and like no code stuff is a good example for me, I loved that stuff. It was so nerdy. I loved building automations and whether I was working, doing it or not, I would be thinking about it 24, 7, reading about it at nighttime. And that was my competitive advantage for other people that would feel like work for me. I could keep geeking on that stuff. And I was just, I was having all sorts of fun. And that when you get something like that, that is a gift. Like that is a gift that I think you almost have an obligation to put back into the world because nobody else like has that unique combination of interests that you have. So like, how can you deploy that to help people and create a new gig of your own design that you're going to be like pumped to get out of bed every morning to go and work on? You can absolutely do it. Go post on LinkedIn right now. What's the thing that you were working on today? What's something that you're blocked on? What's a cool thing that you just figured out? Your employer can't stop you from posting on LinkedIn on your free time. Like, don't post about a client, but just start. You got to start. You're not going to be good at it until you do it bad a whole bunch of times. Nobody's looking at you. There's no reason to be embarrassed. You got to start somewhere because honestly, building your own thing, like willing a cool thing into existence, like that's, that's probably the most rewarding thing there is. That's all I got. Take care.