361 Overcoming Fear When Changing Tech in your Firm

Okay. Pretty much every accounting firm right now is at a point where they're like, ooh, we should probably make this or that tech change. But you're. You're teetering. You're like, do I do it now? Maybe we do it later. You're thinking of all the ways that it could go wrong. You're like, what is my team going to say when I tell them that Jason told me that I should go and use this app? And I think he's right, but there's all these ways that it could go wrong. I also just got off a busy season, and I could really use a nap and don't want to commit to more work. These are all the voices that are constantly going on in your head, and it is, admittedly, really hard to keep them quiet. But you know what? They aren't. They aren't cold and logical, and we're accountants, and so that's what we got to get back to, right? That's. That might actually be terrible advice. But those ambiguous fears, let's sort of pick them apart and figure out what's valid and what's not valid and just make the right decision. And that's the goal today. To run through an exercise to assess that fear of tech change for what it is. Not to invalidate it because it might be valid, but to just better dig into what do I actually need to be afraid of? What steps can I take today to get ahead of that? And if it does go sideways, how could I even remedy it? How could I fix that? Because if I can fix it, I got nothing to be afraid of, right? Okay, let's do it. Come on in. Let's talk about big, big, spooky tech changes. I don't know about you. This is my internal monologue at nighttime as I'm falling asleep and, like, considering this hard change.

Oh, boy, here we go. Diving into the deep end. So making a big tech change in the accounting firm, huh? That's like deciding to swap out all your coffee for green smoothies. Sounds healthy, but terrifying. What if the new system crashes? Or worse, what if it works so well that everyone thinks, why didn't we do this sooner? Then, bam, you're the hero. But also now they expect you to fix everything. Even the printer, which has been jammed since 20. 19.

19. That is the struggle. But I. I mean, Jason gave me, like, it's a good recommendation. I'm pretty sure that this is the right thing to do.

Oh, if Jason recommended it. Oh, that changes everything. Jason, the guru of good ideas, Right? But what if Jason's last suggestion of adding a popcorn machine in the break room led to that whole seagull invasion? Okay, okay, focus. Jason's right more often than not, if he says it's a smart move, maybe it is. Just, just imagine a world where the numbers practically balance themselves. Like a self cleaning kitchen. No, wait, that would be chaos. Where would the forks go?

While I am flattered chat GPT I don't. I think we all got a little bit dumber in that exchange. And if there's, if there's a really forced way to tease a lesson out of that interaction is that your brain isn't really very good about like pulling all these sort of fears and concerns and potential outcomes into like a clear model of, okay, we do this and then we do that and then we do that and then if something wrong happens, we do this. Like, that's what we got to try to get back to is something a little more explicit. Also, don't make decisions after like 8pm don't try to do any logical thing. The other night I was laying in bed in like a full panic that I had forgotten a conference that I was supposed to be speaking at. And it's literally the middle of the night and it was some like some hypothetical person that wasn't even a real person, but I had some obligation to them to go speak and I slept terrible that entire night. Does this ever happen to you? Like, it wasn't even a real thing and I have no idea where it came from. But I'll tell you, oftentimes I'll be like, I'm not that tired, but I'm going to bed. You know what I should do right now? I should set my mind to solving this hard problem because I got maybe 30 minutes to kill before I fall asleep. And surely this will be the time. This will be the time where I figure it out and get to a reasonable conclusion that's. It's probably not going to happen. Remember 10pm Tony O deep cut. Maybe we ought to bring 10pm Tony back. Okay, why change tech? What are the big overarching positives? The reasons why you need to do it sets your firm on a better trajectory for the future. We all have this like, firm tech dysmorphia where you're like, well, I see that other tech, that other firm over there, they're using something different. It must be better or just that like perpetual anxiety that you just aren't on the right system. Right. And so you're always sniffing around, like always looking for that different thing and changing this and that rather than being like reaching this, this sort of nirvana sort of perfect situation where you're on the perfect tech stack and everything just runs like that in our head. That exists. But I don't know a single person that's ever like gotten there and has a, a comfort level with their tech stack to where they're not still always perpetually looking around. That is probably more a problem with ourselves setting boundaries around tech change. And admittedly this is hard to do when you don't have good tech information and when you make bad decisions. Like when we go onto the wrong platform, we, or if we don't have a high degree of confidence in what we're choosing, we're simultaneously unwilling to commit to not changing for another couple few years because it's a little bit more of a guess than you would like it to be. But I would argue these days we have greater transparency into making buying decisions. You can talk with more firms than ever before. You should get to a point in my recommendations. I try to steer you down the right path. You should be able to get to a point where you know this platform is not perfect in many ways, but it is the best for us today. And if that's the case, I can commit to going to this new practice management system, whatever it is, new tax tool, and commit to it for two or three years. Because it's that boundary, that commitment, that focus is incredibly valuable. It, it makes it easier for you to justify investing in an implementer to ensure that you actually adopt it the right way from the beginning and don't waste years using it the wrong way. It can give you your focus back when you don't have to keep tuned in to like every other alternative to that tool for the next few years. Instead you agree ahead of time, at this future date, we're going to reassess where we're at and what makes sense at that point in time. So like maybe the best benefit to come out of this is sort of the mental boundaries you can put around. I did my due diligence. We're on the right tool for the job right now and we're not going to revisit it until some future date. That's kind of the internal upside of changes like this, the external and is the client experience. And there's. We don't always put a level of urgency to the client experience like we do our internal workflows where we're like, if we don't fix this, the next busy season is going to be awful or the year end. Getting 1099 out in January is going to be a pain unless we fix this thing now. But every single day that your clients are using systems like they're building an opinion of what it's like working with you, whether you are a modern purveyor of accounting expertise and un. The unfortunate reality is if the apps that they're interacting with are really dumb and look old fashioned and don't look like anything else that they use every day, then they're going to think that you're old school. Like whether you have, whether whether there's even a better tool for that job or not. Like the perception of you will be that you're old school. I think it was who was this? I think it was Patrick Dictor on, on Twitter last week saying something along the lines of Amazon has created the expectation for every other business that things need to be immediate, that everything needs to come with a free refund. Like all of these sort of expectations that are unrealistic for many types of businesses in the accounting vertical. I think software is probably the biggest rub here for us where somebody could use TurboTax or somebody could use, you know, Chime, like a very modern consumer banking platform or something like that where you're getting just this triple a software experience and then they come to you and they use this app and they're like, well, this kind of stinks. Like this isn't as good as the other stuff that I use. And through no fault of yours or my own, like, yeah, like they're just in, in any vertical. This isn't even just an accounting thing in any vertical. You're not going to have stuff at the same level as you have with like killer consumer products. But that's also a spectrum. Like, you know, the tools in our space, there are some that provide really nice modern interfaces and then others that do not that are just awful. And that's the stuff that we have to actively steer clear of. And the trap there is sometimes those are actually good workflow tools, but the client experience isn't very good. The problem is every single day you are forcing clients to work that way. Like their perception of you is not one of a premium firm and it costs you real money. So improving the client experience. Just know that like as we're weighing tech decisions, we're inherently going to get more excited about workflow improvements because those are the systems that we use every single day. But if we were in our clients shoes, we would put a greater urgency on implementing things that improve the Client experience, make it feel more premium. So somehow we have to like bias our minds to factor that in more than we usually would. Like, if you drink, you know, the, the Jeff Bezos Amazon Kool Aid, like they always had, like when they're having a meeting, they had like this empty chair that was supposed to represent, you know, the customer. What would the customer say about this? We kind of have to like figure out a version of this. Otherwise we're just, we're going to meet with our teams and all we're ever going to talk about is like research and workflows and stuff like that that don't ultimately have as big of an impact on the overall health of the business as what we can charge people and how clients perceive the experience, whether it's premium or not. They have no idea if we're more technically capable than another firm. They genuinely have no way to test that. But they do know when they come in and they see the plant in the corner that's like dead and cobwebs hanging down and it smells like somebody just died in your lobby, they're like, well, this is weird. I don't know that I want to work with them. Meanwhile, that firm is like the premier firm for taxidermists. So they're actually the exact firm that that person wanted to work with. But the packaging, everything around it and how they perceive that firm wasn't up to snuff. So considering tech change, if it is something that impacts the client's experience, we have to somehow like manufacture more motivation to prioritize that. But the reasons why we don't make these big changes, we're afraid. We're afraid it's the wrong decision. We're afraid what the team's reactions will be. We don't want to burn out the team. Maybe we're afraid of clients perception of the new process. This is particularly painful if you have a really wide spectrum of different types of clients. And the 80 year old firm that I bought, we had, I mean, every type of client imaginable from like avocado Toast software developer, millennial type folks, to people in their 90s who didn't have computers. And the big blocker in that firm for the longest time was, well, what about this subset of our client who, this change of our client list for whom this change won't work. And so the, the firm itself, it just didn't change for decades. It just remained the same. Because no matter what you change, there would be somebody on the client list that that change would upset. Now, part of that was the insane diversity of different types of folks that were on the client list. And it was just too many different types of people. But the other part of that is as a firm you kind of got to be opinionated about what the best ways are to do things and ensure that you're pulling the firm in the direction that's best for your A and B clients. And, and that S tier client that you haven't even gotten to yet, that's even better. Like you're building your firm for the next client. And too often we don't make those hard changes in order to appease C and D clients, the people who aren't like actually trending the direction we want to be trending. And as a result it holds the entire business back. This episode is sponsored in part by Live Flow. A lot of folks using the new Live Flow dashboard features for all sorts of stuff. Among them actual internal dashboards that are connected to your clients ledgers. What? Excuse me. So normally you think about a dashboard being like a client facing thing where they can get some sort of insights, make decisions based on it, but you can also do the same thing for your internal bookkeeping team. Maybe you are monitoring bookkeeping that is kind of led by the client, or maybe you're using it for quality assurance, like a single dashboard to see the status of that company's book books. Because Live Flow will keep pulling in live data coming in from the ledger every single day. Or alternatively you create that dashboard as a snapshot, more like a work paper that is like a view of it at a point in time. I know firms that use Live Flow for managing the month end closes for all of their clients because it's just more efficient than having to click around inside the ledger itself and like generate PDF work papers, all that, right? Interesting use case for dashboards. Learn more about Lifelo. Check out the link down in the show notes. 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 picking a PM, it comes down to the four C's capabilities, client experience, clarity and 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 client have a really unique client experience. It's basically like a two sided task management system. You're doing your work over here, client's 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, with that side of the systems that you use today, Client might be a great fit for you. Learn more about that one. Check out the link down in the show notes. So just to get super explicit here, because ultimately in your right mind, not, not the mind that's laying in bed about to go to sleep, but in your best mind, you know, doing this and going through this exercise of making this change, at the very least we're going to learn like, do I want it to be the right change and save us a bunch of time? And all the clients love it. Absolutely. But you know that inaction is also not an option because not doing anything defers learning. And if you do that change right now, on the other side of it, you're going to be better informed to know, well, here's actually what we really wanted and here's what doesn't work for our firm. And we're in a better position to either move forward with this tool or actually know what we need from a tool if this one doesn't work. And that's what we should be striving for is, is learning. And obviously there's a lot of nuance there. You can't do it irresponsibly and burn everybody along the way. But the firm that is learning like, that's a compounding benefit where they're doing more testing, they're figuring out what works, what doesn't work, and they end up just fundamentally in a completely different place over a 5 to 10 year horizon. And when we're thinking clearly, that's who you want to be, right? Like that's what you aspire to be. So to real, like tactically, like, dig into each of the fears. Like I sat down, I sort of did this exercise and I'll put a copy of or a link to the worksheet. This is the fear setting exercise we've done a few times. I'll put a link to the worksheet in the show notes. I jotted down what my biggest fears would be in a big tech change. And I've done a number of them. The exercise is basically list out these fears one by one, consider any ways you could prevent these fears. And then third Consider any ways that you could repair things if that fear actually did come to a head. Next you want to consider the benefits of a partial success and then last, the cost inaction. So my fears, if I write these out one by one, first up, it's just getting it wrong for that not to be the tool that we needed after all. So how do we prevent that? Well, we ask around to try to make as validated of a decision as possible. If you're a US firm, I think I, I've given people a really good shortcut to reduce 75% of the options down to just like a subset of frankly recommendations where any of them you're probably going to be happy with. And picking between them comes down to very nuanced aspects of the firm. So like I can get you, if you're a US firm, I can get you 80% of the way there. But how do you like, how do we as much as possible prevent getting it wrong, which is probably our biggest fear? I would say resist the urge to go like invent your own path. There are for sure 100 of your own sort of totally custom different paths that you could take that would probably be fine. But when you know that there is a path that other people are using and finding success with, why not? Why not? Like that's kind of what in my old age that's what I've gotten to is why not? That's the path I'm going to take. Other thought I had on on prevention here, hire an implementer, even pick their brain before making the switch to that tool to get as much transparency as possible into like the day ins and day out of using that tool. If you talk with other firms who use it, gold. But like you want to involve an implementer because oftentimes they are more knowledgeable about the product than the folks at that product themselves. Like, especially if you're talking with salespeople, we want to collect as much information as possible to validate this decision before we go into it. Within reason, you don't want to take years to make that decision. Right. But we talk a lot on this podcast about don't rely on landing pages, don't rely on salespeople, rely on what's actually working, not a new feature that just got launched. I'm frankly not super interested in that. It is a signal of where they're headed. But I'm going to make buying decisions on what's already working and try to get as much social proof as possible. Second biggest fear for me, the team doesn't want to change. Best ways I found to mitigate this is involve them in the process from as early as possible. If you come in and you just kind of drop that bomb on the team and there's naturally going to be some resistance from most people. Now the big asterisk here is not all teams are made the same. And you can actually hire a team that is energized by change. Like many of you who listen to this, you are the weirdos who are energized by change. We are not the only people out there. And I found in my experience when I bought my firm, it was a whole bunch of people that were exactly what you would expect. They were very change averse. Folks that were wired like almost all accountants are, I think like what you would expect them to be. And even though there were, you know, 30 or 40 people there, all it took was two or three hires of people who could be change agents that completely changed the attitudes. Every time you add a person like that to the team, you'll actually find that they connect with a couple other existing members of the team and those folks become a little more open to change as well. If you don't have those people, you know just how hard it is to be like, like the sole person bringing energy to it every single day. That is so hard. You are like the one battery that all change has to run off of. And that's just a really, really tough spot to put yourself in. I highly recommend augmenting the team with folks who can be energized by change. Actually look for this in the hiring process. Like what is their appetite for change? But also just bring this back around to implementers again. An implementer, when you're considering a big change like this is a really valuable like independent third party that can sometimes be the bad guy, they can sometimes be the punching bag. Not to like shirk all your responsibility on this other person, but if the only alternative is me having to be the bad guy, it is nice to have another person there, another punching bag. So try to involve the team in the process. From early on. Basically what I would do is I would get it down to a very small number of options and I would make sure that everybody was agreed on the underlying problems that we were trying to solve for. And then I would cut them loose on make a decision here. And if you think about the way I've made recommendations for, you know, tax tools and practice management systems, that sort of thing, usually I will give a top recommendation. But if I were to put that in front of my team, like a practice management system. I would. I would probably put three tools in front of them and say, here are the problems that we're trying to solve. Go do research on these three tools, come back, and let's. Let's come to a consensus as much as we can. And in that process, you're going to even see people kind of step up to say, like, oh, I'm. I'm open to being even more involved in this process maybe, because now I'm like, I'm kind of into it. Like, I actually learned about XYZ in this product and I want to learn more. Great. Like, you just got yourself off the hook for having to be the sole person to drive all that third fear that I wrote down. Somebody on my team leaves as a result. Like, this was a very real thing for us where we're like, yeah, we could go to better technology, but if it burns people out and we lose a couple people, that is a way bigger problem that I don't want to have to deal with. In my experience, where this happened, where I saw this happen and it was at its worst was when you are forcing things on a team and not keeping those lines of communication open, like, not being human with them and like, trying to connect with them on their level about how this impacts them and the work that they do. Maybe the. The ugliest example of this that I ran into was, like, earlier stage in my career when we're trying to pull in, like, OCR technology to streamline some aspects of tax prep. And you've probably encountered some version of this, the whole, like, pull in a tool to do a thing for you. Accountants still double checks the thing, so the tool ultimately didn't save you any time. Like, this is accounting Change Management 101. And when we really got deep into that, what we found is that there wasn't like a unified yardstick for savings because everybody was doing the same process differently. So there were some people that were really excited about it that it was helpful for, and then other people that it didn't help at all because their process was completely different. And when we rammed that change through to say, like, no, this is the future. We just have to lean into this without adequately, quickly helping people to understand how they could change their process, to rely on this new resource or, or to have the conversation to even say, like, this process is better than that process, or compare the two and like, not just steamroll, like, no, don't do it like that. Do it like this. Now. Like, if you, if you can hit pause and try to get some understanding among everybody, like, it helps so much because if, if you're like me and you try to push through that change too fast, you're like undermining oftentimes how people have done this thing for decades and they're very opinionated on this is the reason that I do this is these like all of this experience that I have and you're just like pulling up the carpet and saying, no, that's not worthwhile at all. Like, it's gonna, it's gonna like hit people pretty deep and sort of challenge their notion of like, what is my value and what I'm bringing to the team. And the solution, like, as with most staff things, is just time, patience, being willing to give them your attention. Not having too many direct reports, that's probably the big thing for most firms is you're in charge of 10 people or you're in charge of 20 people. And the reality is if you're trying to do other stuff, like client work, when you have that many people reporting to you, I mean, how many, how many? They say managers shouldn't have more than like six direct reports or something like that. And then you've got people in accounting firms that do client work all day long and are on client calls perpetually and they have 10 plus people on their team that all report to them. You're doing a crappy job for everybody at that point. And then somebody leaves and it's like, well, yeah, like you never actually like took the time or had the time because of the circumstances that you kind of put yourself in to connect with that person and understand where they're at. I forgot the third stage of this. So we talk about the fear and the prevention and then how to repair it, which is especially important here. How do you repair that? I mean, in a perfect world, you go out and you find a new person that is energized by change. In fact, if you are so afraid of making a change, like if the fear of somebody leaving is so severe that it's keeping you from making a change, that's a, that's a real big signal that there's a, there's a larger staffing issue there. And so you should probably go out and be trying to find the more energized person anyways. That's something that you, that you already need. But even with my team members who are most change averse like it it, at the end of the day, it was totally a human thing. Like it was about getting to their level, making them feel valued, giving them opportunities to, like, speak into what was happening with their experience and provide their context. It's usually as simple as that. This episode is sponsored in part by Team Up Boy. Team up helps you find talented offshore accounts in the Philippines that you can hire directly, add them to your team just like anybody else that you would hire remotely. I was talking with somebody the other day who recently launched a solo firm. They're growing, they kind of want to hire, but the cost of making that first hire feels really burdensome. What do you think? I told them higher Offshore. Whether the cost is burdensome or not, that's where I'd start. In fact, when I drafted my first 20 employees in that podcast episode a couple months ago, first two or three were all offshore. Talk with another firm owner who bought a firm from a partner who's in the process of phasing out along with another one of their biggest producers. And she's like, I got to backfill this. I got to hire all this work somehow. The former managing partner and their most senior producer. What do I do? I'm like, you're rebuilding a completely different firm from scratch, basically. And the way that I would do it, the way that I would keep getting the work done, I would hire onshore people to be client facing. But I'd start making offshore hires now because I can find them quick and they're really stinking good. That was my experience anyways, for the last five hires I made in my firm were offshore. Obvious cost benefits. But you know what? They're capable of doing just about anything that anybody in your firm can do. I'd encourage you to learn more. Ask the embarrassing questions, get on a call with Team Up. Just learn. Because it's increasingly becoming the norm. I'm hearing from people almost every, honestly, almost every week now that are like, you convince me I'm doing it. I'm excited about it. And the only two offshore like placement groups we work with on this podcast, super, super vetted, talked with a lot of people that were blown away by the good experience they had. So if you're thinking about it, check out Team up link down in the show notes. This episode is sponsored in part by Ignition. Come, come, come, come, come. Here's the thing. Here's the thing about client billing. You can't bill for the time you spend billing. You can't, you can't. It is pure waste. And we're bad at billing because it's, it's icky. You let things slide. You don't get paid. You waste time. Waste time chasing people for money. That's not what I did. I would just. I didn't want to waste time chasing them and so I would just. I just eat it. Don't do that. This is where Ignition comes in. The leading revenue generation platform for accounts and professional professional services. When I was running my firm, Ignition wiped out our ar, it's true, and significantly reduced the time spent billing clients, saving our partners over a thousand hours in the first year because they didn't have to bill all that stuff manually. Man with the Ignition, we won more business with impressive online proposals. No more hustling, hustle and PDFs and Word docs. We automatically pulled payment up front or at the end of a job when it was done. No more dialing for dollars. We transitioned our firm to more recurring revenue and better managed scope creep. No more leaving money on the table. Ignition is making thousands of firms more money and genuinely made us more profitable. Check out why over 7,000 of the smartest businesses run on ignition@ignition app.com I'll put a link in the show. Notes 4th fear that I had put down here the team feeling burned out heading into busy season. We got this wrong one time where we did a big old super stressful change. Right, right. Headed right into the busiest season. It was like everybody was out of gas as busy season was starting and that was rough. That was largely a product of making the change too late and like not holding people to specific milestones. So if you're trying to do something big like the sooner you can start this process, if you know that it's the right thing to do, dragging your feet another month like everybody else is going to pay the price for that. So how can we accelerate this? Pull in an implementer to like set up an aggressive timeframe for you and nail down what those milestones are and the responsibilities of everybody like to deliver in order to hit each of those milestones at each one, what does it require from different members of the team? Like what are the roles of people who are involved in this change and what do each of them need to do in order for us to successfully hit each of those milestones and help everybody understand that it is very important that we keep to this schedule to avoid the burnout like heading into busy season. This is the last thing that we want is people feeling overwhelmed. Part of this is also being realistic about the volume of change that's possible in a small amount of time. If we look at now between the end of the year You've got several holidays where people are going to be peace and out for a while. In my experience, January, the new year doesn't always like kick off with a real rah rah, like high production sort of frame of mind. But then you get halfway through January, at least in the US and then everybody's burning time on, on 1099. And if you do bookkeeping in any way, then yes, like the beginning of your January, all of your January and February is just like pedal to the metal trying to get books wrapped up. And so if you're considering a big change, like you got to make sure that you can fit it within a reasonable time frame and that everybody will agree to what their inputs need to be to make sure you hit that, that sort of like end goal of when it's got to get done. Couple thoughts on like prevention and and repair there though is are you giving like team members a way to recharge? Like do you ever do off sites with the team? Like do you give them. You create environments where they can like build relationships with each other and have like good conversations in a different environment. Oftentimes we're super fixated on the consumption of energy, but not creating opportunities for folks to recharge. Maybe you have to literally force them to take time off. Maybe you get everybody together for the first time in a long time and do sort of a couple day retreat. Maybe even just do a thing where it's like more social, like a couple nights. Folks can bring spouses, stuff like that. Something to kind of like nail down that team connection. Having that team connection before you head into a busy season, it makes a world of difference. And if you're ever going to invest in something like that, do it before a busy season, like ride that high. It's not going to last forever and people are going to not like each other again. A few weeks into busy season probably. But it's almost like pushing that bow wave of the hard thing when everyone's still feeling connected. All right, fifth fear I had here. Clients won't like the new thing as much. To me, prevention here looks like just ask your A and B clients, actually put it in front of them and get their thoughts. It's what your A and B clients think that ultimately matters. The C and D clients, it matters to a degree, but to a much, much lesser degree. So that's one that we can genuinely like validate ahead of time. And then sixth, last fear I had here. It's going to be a lot of work. Biggest trap here. If we're thinking about prevention is what most small firm owners do. Or they put it all on their back. They're like, this was my idea. I'm excited about this. I'm going to start this thing and make it all happen myself. If I can bring you back to the tax software analogy, I always come back to when our firm changed tax softwares and it was a huge undertaking. My partner learned the new tax software and I did not. And as a result, my partner and I, we had very different experiences of that transition and even going forward of the expectations of us when it came to that tax software. But we had 40 people working for us. If you're employing 40 people, does it make sense for you to be the expert in your tax software? It absolutely does not. Otherwise, what do you like? What are those 40 people there for? So resist the urge to put this all on your back and do it yourself. Pull the team in as soon as you can. Pull an implementer in, pull in another firm. If you're a solo firm, like, consider an implementer, but also pull in another firm that's going through the same transition. Is there a way that you can do this with somebody else and share ideas along the way? Now consider what the benefits are of an attempt or of a partial success. We're quick to jump to all the ways that it can go sideways. But don't forget the reasons why you're considering this. You're going to learn a whole bunch along the way, like it's a worthwhile exercise. If you think that there's a new category of tech or a new, better way of doing something that a, that a new tool will enable, then no matter what, when you go down that path, you're going to learn a lot. You're going to have some meaningful conversations with AMB clients, probably to get a better understanding of what they would be excited about. You're creating an opportunity for team members to step up in a way that is really, really valuable for you. When you need more help creating opportunities for the folks that are willing to like, step into that void and maybe most importantly, going down this path leads to the next more valuable set of questions. And that's the risk of being too slow to change or to not changing is you don't know what that next, like, more interesting version of change looks like and what questions you're asking on the other side of it. Last, the cost of inaction, emotionally, physically, financially. Here's the thing. If you're stuck on a hard change right now and you've Got time to do it and you don't do it, you're going to be kicking yourself until you get that next window of time to do it. Like, don't live with that regret if you know it's the right thing to do with limited exception. Like, you got to, you got to kind of look at the schedule and see what can we reasonably fit in with the team we have. But there's a real cost to to not doing it. And it's deferred learning. It's maybe clients like not having a positive experience working with the firm. It's almost certainly lost workflow capacity potential. But I would say the biggest thing is, is the overall progression of the firm as a whole and where you would otherwise be on the other side of that change if you made it now compared to waiting 6 months or 12 months to do the same thing. So if I can send you packing with like a few nuggets, involve the team in the process as early as possible. Hire an implementer. So, so valuable. Such a good investment. Accountants get worried like stuck on the cost of this. Consider the cost of not going about this the right way. Like the cost of making the wrong big tech decision is like years of lost productivity. So don't be afraid to pay for a good implementer. Build out a timeline that everybody agrees to. Get as much help as you can along the way. Don't put this all on your own back. See if there's a way to systematize the feedback loop with your team members that you're concerned about. Like for me, it required standing recurring meetings to do something as simple as go and walk into somebody's office and see how they're doing. Like, that was the way that I'm wired. When I had a physical office, that was literally what it took was on my calendar. I had to put a time to go and have a conversation with a person, otherwise it usually wouldn't happen. So how can you build those conversations into your routine? But then consider if there's a way to even extend that to your clients. Make sure that they are feeling heard. Your best clients, your A and B clients. And to do so it might require creating that like time or that channel to have that conversation. If we just rely on it happen, happening organically, usually that's kind of where those things go to die, right? Look at me, look into my eyes. If you're listening, look into my ears. You can do this. Okay. If you're thinking about it, push the boat out. I, I've been using that expression a lot lately, and I'm not sure actually what it means. If you're thinking about it, do it. Commit. Be smart about it. Have a plan. But pull an implementer in sooner than later because it is change season and they're probably going to be busy too. Gather as much good information as you can to validate that decision. But then, buddy, once. Once you know it's the thing to do, do it. You got this? You can do it.