364 The Right And Wrong Place to be CHEAP In Your Firm

Hey Jason, I can get this tool for like $0 next year so I'm thinking about going that way. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Stop. Most of the worst tech decisions in accountingdom are made based on promos based on a contract where you get locked in to the wrong tool. But I can tell you most of the time the folks that have to give you a screaming deal, they don't have the solution that you want to begin with. Makes sense, right? You get what you pay for. But is that the, is that the case in every situation? Like if you follow that all the way through, then you're just buying all the most expensive tech, right? Surely that can't be the right answer either. Come on in, let's talk about it. Also because it's a Q and A Friday and so we got a cornucopia of things to cover. The best hosting providers as decided by a bunch of firms on social. I posted who I thought was the best and boy did I get educated. A whole bunch of other hosting providers came out of the woodworks that people love. How to compensate your non client facing roles. Great question. Thoughts on accounting cs? Terrible question. And last, how to deliver better advisory with your accounting work. Something that we've probably all given some thought about. Do I just ship off the financial statements and call it there? Do we start baby stepping, baby stepping into a little bit more. Pull up a chair, pop those air bobs in, turn off the voice, pass through K. Let's lock in. It's Jason on first. Okay, this came up with someone I was exchanging emails with. It comes up very common accountants, they just like their deals most of us. I honestly I think if we put accountants on a spectrum of like people in society, I think we're probably on the cheapskate end of the spectrum. By and large you can't generalize anything about any people group let alone accountants. There's a, there's a huge spectrum there but by and large I do think that we are pretty cost cost sensitive and I'll tell you who's who knows that more than anybody is the old fuddy daddy software platforms in our space. Your Thompson, Reuters, your cch, your Wolters, Klu, they love giving deals. And there's actually probably some lessons to be taken here by like the skinny jeans SaaS platforms is oftentimes this is driven by the fact that most accounting firms make tech decisions on like this annual cycle. Like they, they once a year like kind of pause and decide are we going to go through this change? And so the whole notion of like ditching a tool after a couple of months or something like, like that, very unlikely. Especially with, with big tools. And so these platforms will come along and they will say like we're going to give you this to you basically for free if you sign this contract in the next week as framing it as some sort of like annual thing that they do. When it's like no, like they're just adding X number of days from when they first talk to you and they're saying like this is, this is your promo, their manufacturing urgency, which is something that we're talking about in the renewal process right now. How can we do that? To incentivize people to create, to make buying decisions faster. That's what these software platforms are doing to you. And so you do it. And sometimes, you know, maybe that's a three year contract in the first year you get free or something like that. But let me skywrite this for you to, to I try to drive this home as clearly as possible. The right tool for you is, is worth its weight in gold because your most valuable currency is time. We've talked before about how accountants have like very different willingnesses to pay for tech. And a lot of that's a product of how premium our firm is. If I charge $100 for a tax return, the notion of paying a, you know, 35 bucks a return to a service that's like going to help me automate some of that Prep. Buddy, that's 35% of my margin. Like I probably can't give that away if I'm only charging a hundred bucks. But for a different firm that charges $5,000 for the same thing, that same $35 service, it's a no brainer, right? And so tech is, is one of those things where it's kind of a fixed cost in some ways. As it, as it applies to like your firm going up market over time, your top line should go up, your profitability ought to go up, but your software costs as a percentage of revenue ought to go down as your firm goes more premium. And especially if tech is, is a way to accelerate your firm's journey to going more premium. And a great example of this is tax advisory tech software that makes it easier to do more tax advisory engagements, which ought to be the most profitable work you do in a tax firm. That's an example where cutting a check and these tax advisory platforms generally are not cheap compared to other tools that you use. But like they know this, they know that there's a lot of Value here it's an example of where cut, cutting a check for that probably accelerates the path to your firm just doing more profitable work in general. Which not only makes that tax advisory tool feel less expensive, but also that 1040 workflow tool that, that QuickBooks plugin where maybe you have to pay per company file, it's connected to that stuff, all gets cheaper as the firm gets more premium and those projects become more profitable. Your software costs do not increase with your engagements and getting more premium. And still too often I will see accountants frame savings promos, that sort of thing, as a rationale, rationale to buy a tool. That tool is either the best thing for you or it's not. And it's extremely rare that like some sort of cost savings factor is ever going to outweigh the time, the stress, the attention, the friction it could create for your clients. I mean, people will split hairs over a practice management system that is, and I don't, I don't mean to like, I don't know, personalize this or be say, you know, this is an unreasonable thing to do. I can completely understand how it happens. But let's just try to put this into perspective. Take a practice management system where one is $40 a month and one is $80 a month and, and very commonly someone will buy the $40 a month per user one because it's cheaper for them and like that ultimately is, is a really big factor in why they made that buying decision in, in the end. Do you know how quickly $40 disappears for a professional staff person? What's. I don't know. I'm so out of touch. What's somebody getting paid annually at, at $40 an hour, that's somebody making $83,000 a year at a, let's say at a 3 to 5 million dollars firm, 83 grand. That's probably like your average salary, median salary. If you're a smaller firm than that, that's probably a little above average. But that $40 Delta 3 that you pay per user per month, that's an hour of somebody's time. You better believe, like you get one client email where they send you some smartphone pictures, there goes your hour. Boom. Just like that. Like that delta. While looking at it in aggregate across, you know, 20 users every single month, maybe that feels like a big number. But oftentimes, especially if we started small and we've grown to this, our minds don't adjust quick enough to like, I, I don't want, I don't want to say you gotta spend money to make money. Cuz it's a stupid expression but our minds don't adjust quickly enough to like what is a worthwhile investment. That is, it's absolutely an investment if that tool is saving you any amount of time. So all of this is to say I think we are too biased to look for savings. And a lot of software platforms know this and they will extend that offer to you. When the, the reality is like you, you need to make a buying decision based on what is the best tool for the job. For me, if it takes any more implementation time, if it means we use it for another year, six years instead of five years, like oh my gosh, every single one of these things blow that relative kind of cost comparison out of the water just by, by choosing the right tool. And my hope for you is this year more than ever before, we have better transparent information we with which to make software buying decisions. I, I, I truly think that we do. I'm really pushing hard on this. I'm, I'm trying to encourage other people to be more transparent about all that. I'm trying to encourage folks that do any degree of influencing, like myself, to truly influence in a positive way. Don't make partnerships with people where you're never gonna be able to recommend something else because you have that partnership. Right? Like ultimately I, I can't look to those people and trust them for making buying decisions. And if they have a partnership deal with somebody that's going to complicate recommendations for, you know, anyone else like this comes up in my business almost every day. Especially the more I put recommendations out there, I'm like well what about all the practice management systems I don't recommend that want to sponsor my content. I'm just, I'm just not going to let you sponsor my content. In fact, there were as many platforms that have sponsored me in the past that are not in my recommendations as are and most of the companies in my recommendations have never sponsored a thing and we'll do some outbound to them and be like hey, do you want to come sponsor stuff? Because we are actively recommending you and, and they have no obligation to by any means. But for example, if you do a partnership with QuickBooks, you know, a ledger platform, something like that. Well, it just got a whole lot harder to Recommend Anything that QuickBooks touches from payroll to ledger stuff, obviously to an uncategorized transaction tool because QuickBooks does a version of that themselves to reporting tools if you partner with a, a practice management system. In fact, I just had this conversation with a sponsor today. I still believe that accountants need to go out and buy a proposal and engagement platform. I still do. To do renewals the way that I think you need to do renewals, which is very high effort because ultimately this is defining the profitability of not just your next year, but all the years in the future too. You know when you chicken out on that client and you don't raise their fees, you're not paying the price for that just next year, you're paying for that forever. So anything that we can do to squeeze a little bit more out of proposals is is worth doing and is like a compounding benefit long term. 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 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 workpaper 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 liveflow. Check out the link down in the show Notes. This episode is sponsored in part by Teamup 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? Hire 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 of 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 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 convinced 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. And so I want the maximum functionality of my renewal tools possible. How do I build in urgency and scarcity? We're actually going to talk more about that next week. How do I make the most of like my 3 or 4 tier proposal options? And so today I recommend those standalone platforms specifically. My top recommendations are Ignition and Anchor. My secondary recommendations are NULA and Go proposal. But I just had a conversation with a sponsor today that wanted me to promote their, the proposal part of their practice management system. Because a whole bunch of PMs now are rolling out a version of this and I'm like, I'm trying to do that. I understand why this is going to have value for some people, but for the way that I, I want to do proposals and renewals, this doesn't work. There's a better tool on the shelf to do this job and it's worth paying for that tool. Because every single engagement that I optimize better, I'm making more money on. And it pays for that tool so fast. Yes. Do I wish I could do everything perfectly with one tool? Certainly. And maybe next year that practice management system will have a version of it that's good enough. We've got like, you know, four or five of them now that are handling kind of proposals and engagement letters. But for me and how I make software recommendations, like, I gotta draw the line there. But if I've gotta deal with a practice management system and that's it, I got a partnership there. Can I really give like, independent advice on how best to build a stack? I don't think you can. So I really wanna push people for the good of the profession, for, for making better, more clear decisions for small firms. Like making that stuff easier when we just spent the last decade and a half learning from our software vendors. Think about, just think about the webinar era. 99% of those webinars are being run by software vendors. Like, we are being programmed by the conferences that we go to that are run by software vendors and sponsored by all of our software vendors. Like, where in the world do you get independent information? Like, my hope is we're hopefully coming out of that to a degree. And I honestly think the first step was creating like paid communities where people can pay to come and get independent information. We had communities in the past that were run by our software vendors, but obviously that's problematic. So I think like paid communities started us down this path. And I'm hopeful we'll see more, you know, a standalone conference around. Pick a name. Brandon hall. Where, you know, 50 people come and hang out and they pay to be there. And maybe there's no sponsors, maybe they just pull in a few brands that he recommends. Like, if I did my own conference, I don't know if I would do it with no sponsors or not. Cause there is value in meeting those people. But I would probably just be limiting that to like, who are the brands that I recommend? Right. Which I, I nail that down and then I build any sort of partnerships around that. So my hope is people have more information than ever before to land on what is the right tool for me. Is, Is price a factor? It is, but I think we're biased to make it too big of a factor. If you consider just how big of an impact the right tool can have on your firm. Okay, hosting providers. Boy, we're getting into the sexy stuff now. Very common question, especially after I said, don't use virtual Office for any of your Thompson Reuters hosting. Way too expensive, super slow, super unreliable. There's way better options that are cheaper, faster and more stable. And so the natural question then was, well then who do I go take my hosting to? And a couple of people that were like, well, I just renewed my contract yesterday. So I went back to my, my private community realize, ran a search for. And honestly, this is the value of communities as you can do the same. Ran a search for ultra tax hosting and there were about two posts per year of somebody asking and then hey, just a mountain of social proof. Everybody commenting saying, here's what I've used, what didn't work, here's what I use now. And it is extremely rare that like almost everyone rallies around being a fervent supporter of a thing. And in this case they did. It was Verito. Verito. I don't know. V E R I T o to just go search Verito. You know, Ultra tax. That was how I found it. People absolutely adore them, which is kind of weird. It's a hosting provider. So I went out of social media and I said like it's very rare that like everybody gets so excited about something this specific and has a universally good experience. Like that seems almost impossible these days. But I posted that out there and almost everyone agreed. Anytime I post a recommendation, there will always be the flip side where somebody had some awful experience. Like they. There's yet to be a time where I make a recommendation and that hasn't been the case. But people also came in and said right works was very good. Ace hosting was very good. And then infinitely virtual. But I've still seen, I think more social proof for Verito Verito V E R I T o than anything else. I think they also do QuickBooks Desktop hosting. Sidebar if you still have clients on QuickBooks Desktop, I know a lot of smart firms that have mandated clients bring that file to their hosted environment. The one that they recommend that could be Verito could be. Could be something else. Then you can have access to that file from anywhere. Just like the client has some of the benefits of going cloud based. If they're really going to hold out on using QuickBooks Enterprise or something like that, that feels like the best compromise that isn't going to make your workflow super challenging enough talking about hosting man. Okay, thoughts? Oh, this isn't any better. Thoughts on accounting cs was talking with a firm recently who's, who's their kind of bookkeeping and like tax prep. Like it's very much built around accounting cs. It's a platform from, from Thomson Reuters. Honestly, like we're, we're pulling a lot of firms out of the woodworks and there's a lot of people listening to this for whom that will be unthinkable. You're like what world. Why would you ever do that? Honestly, that's the norm still. Like we are in such an echo chamber here talking about more Progressive ways to run firms. There are a hundred times as many of us out there not connecting with this content at all, whose only peek into the outside world is like they're Thompson Reuters rep. Right? Like that's how most firms are right now. Thoughts on Accounting cs? Why I don't recommend that sort of thing. One, it's putting you in an ecosystem that you don't want to be in. Like every tech decision that we make, we're hitching our wagon to where something will take us longer term. And right now if you look at the fastest developing things in the space, it is the, the SaaS platforms, the cloud service providers and it is honestly AI like large language models and ChatGPT and that sort of thing getting unbelievably better month over month. And so even if you strip away like is accounting CS the best tool to do that job? Almost certainly not because you've got, you know, with QuickBooks, Ledger Zero has had this for a long time. They have several advisor only versions of their subscription where for less than $10 a month you get a cloud accounting file. And so for less than $100 a year now you can have a client that's on QuickBooks, that's on Xerox. Not gonna have all the bells and whistles of a full blown file. But for those itty bitty things like a rental LLC or something like that that are problematic and you can't put them anywhere else, I would sooner put them onto a cloud ledger platform so that there's like a first step towards ongoing accounting rather than a client coming to me every single year with a pile of bank statements and saying can you do my books as you do my tax return? That's a really hard way to make money. So I don't go to accounting CS because I'd rather go to a, an accounting ledger. And we also have tools like Tally for that will integrate it really well into ultratax or whatever tax software you use. But the bigger thing for me is probably just getting out of the Thompson Reuters ecosystem because it's not one that's developing as fast as everything else in the space and to just like be plugged into a modern tool stack. Because Tally four for example, which if you're not familiar, it's a cloud based trial balance utility that will connect to QuickBooks and Xero and integrate with your tax software. They're doing a whole bunch of cool stuff now around like work papers and other things that are improving around that product developing really fast. And I want to be on board for that. Like I want to not only use the best tool for the job today, but increase the likelihood that five years from now I'm going to be on a better platform than I'm on today. And for the legacy software providers in the accounting space, like that's just not the case. They're just not developing and if they are, it's at like a glacial pace. This was a great question I got from someone. How do, how to compensate non client facing roles. So for the first time, maybe a firm is, is going to have a team member that isn't doing client work. And in my, this happened in my firm. I had an 80 year old tax firm, bought out several partners, I owned it with a partner and my role became that of being not client facing at all. The first time in 80 years this firm had had anybody that had not done client work. But I was like the big boss when I transitioned to that role. Like I was probably becoming the CEO. But if you're not the big boss, this was a little stickier, right? Because people value those non client roles in very different ways. And in fact a lot of people will just say I'm never ever going to let you do that because you don't have value unless you're doing client work. Right. So there's a whole bunch of variables here and like what is the right answer from what's the size of the firm and how many hats are you wearing and that sort of thing. It is a absolutely worthwhile conversation to have sooner than later because if you do aspire to have that non client facing role, the sooner you can get down to talking turkey with the decision maker, the sooner you'll know, oh, this is how much they actually value this. And maybe it's the same way you value it, maybe it isn't, but you want to know that sooner than later. And I'll be honest, I didn't have a great answer for this question until I actually started thinking about this is going to sound like an advertisement. It absolutely isn't. I did a demo day for RC Reports a couple months ago. RC Reports, if you're not familiar, they do reasonable compensation reports for S Corps. If you're not in US Tax. I'm sorry for the sentence that I just said, but one of the ways that they arrive at what a quote unquote reasonable salary ought to be is they take all of the jobs that that person has. They could be, you know, could be 20% office manager, 20% librarian, 30% this, you know, 40% that. I think we're over 100 now. But they had them split up all of their roles and then they say, are, are they above average at this, are they below average at this, are they just average at this? And in general, in a small business where you're being asked to do a number of things, you're gonna be, you're gonna be average at a lot of those things and then your domain of expertise you're probably like above average or exceptional at. And then it takes like actual wage data and it allocates what your salary ought to be according to how much time you spend in each of those roles and how good you are and at each of those roles. And as I was considering this question of how do you compensate a non client facing role, that kind of seemed like the most reasonable thing I could come up with. Right. So like, what are the hats you're going to wear in this non client facing role? Well, maybe, maybe I'm like doing marketing, maybe I'm doing some HR stuff, maybe I'm doing just kind of some general business strategy things like figure out if you can or, or oftentimes it's tech related, automation, more sort of CTO type stuff. Figure out as best as you can, like how to agree with the stakeholders on what the split of that role is and how you're going to spend your time. Also be realistic here. Like if you've never been a CTO before, if you've never been like a big marketing boss before, is it reasonable to think like, can I command a $300,000 CTO salary? Like, probably not. If we're in a small firm, if you, if you actually haven't had a role like that before. But it seems like a framework that's a starting point and it's like a, I don't know, a way that you could put something together that's actually founded in something real and could kind of pass the sniff test. I also like that it gets real specific because oftentimes heading into a role like this, you can have conversations that are more general about why this could be worthwhile. And oftentimes when it's general, everyone projects onto that what they want it to be. So partner A could want it to be marketing, partner B could want it to be systems. It's an opportunity to force everyone to get on the same page about what exactly that role is and then put it into like real dollars and sense of like, well, what would it look like to go out and pull in someone else to do this work? I don't Seem like, seem like the most like rational way to get to something. Again. This is almost one of those like value pricing situations where if you're not the big boss, it's only worth as much as the big boss is willing to pay for it. It's also the sort of thing where it may not make sense to super cannonball into this. If you're doing all client work right now and you fully go to doing no client work, you probably going to have a hard time with that as opposed to transitioning into it and being able to prove like here's the value of what I'm doing and get some wins. In my case, like when I put that hat on like I got the firm through, through Covid and we're ahead of the curve on all the COVID relief stuff protected the business with some additional like the ERC services we were doing and that sort of thing ended up cutting like 30% of the client base, increasing fees quite a bit. In my case it was very clear how my role had improved the health of the firm as a whole, which coming into it had kind of all the trappings you'd expect from an 80 year old legacy firm. That was easy for me to show. If you want to get some easy wins is probably more realistic. You start with like going half time non client facing and see if you can find some low hanging fruit, like measurable stuff where you can really move the needle and make a difference. And then it may be a little easier for the big bosses to buy into you going 100% non client facing. I loved it. Personally, I kind of burned out on doing the work and it's ultimately what brought me back to the profession. Obviously when we come here, like I don't tell you how to prepare a 1040 or do bookkeeping. I don't do QuickBooks demos like you know, a Hector Garcia. Because the part of it that I enjoy is the strategy of the business as a whole. That's ultimately what I learned that I loved and I still love it. And it's worth exploring that because you may find that that's actually the part of it that you enjoy as well. Or maybe just the marketing part or the automation part or something like that. This episode is sponsored in part by Client Hub. Recently my practice management system recommendations for 2025. Guess who was on the list? Better believe Client Hub was there. ClientHub. They've got a four step framework for picking your next practice management system. The four Cs. We're not talking about no diamonds. The third C we're talking about today, Clarity. Because there's massive value in how clear and approachable that platform is. Client Hub is nice. It's actually a nice place to be. You know, some software platforms you kind of vibe with, you get in, you're like, I could imagine spending time here. ClientHub's designed to make everything as simple as possible for the firm owner, their clients and their team. Well organized, super clear. Layout features are powerful, yet simple. Means you spend less time having to support your team on questions, your clients on questions. Oh, ever had to train a thousand clients on a new client portal? It's not good that Clarity. It is delivered by Client Hub. If that sounds like something you may be in the market for, check out the 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 services. When I was running my firm, Ignition wiped out our air. 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 build all that stuff manually. Man, with Ignition, we want more business with impressive online proposals. No more hustle and hustle and PDFs and Word docs. We automatically pulled payment upfront or at the end of a job. When it was done. No more dialing for dollars. We transitioned our firm to more recurring revenue and better 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 over 7,000 of the smartest businesses run on ignition@ignition app.com but link in the show notes last. How do we improve the advisory that we do with accounting work? Ain't that $1 million question. Firms are all across the board here. Any firm that delivers a set of financial statements. It's funny that what we call the things that we do. The best vernacular I was able to get to with my firm was bookkeeping versus controllership versus VCFO work and clients have in their head a notion of what bookkeeping is worth. And I'm constantly trying to escape that. Not because like, I don't know, I don't think bookkeepers are worthwhile or something like that. But even if you are a bookkeeper, I think we always have to be mindful of like escaping the gravitational pull of something that feels commoditized. The exact same thing happens for tax prep as well. Like folks, most folks coming in have a notion of what it costs to get a personal or a business tax return done and how much we decommoditize that in the eyes of our clients is a huge spectrum. If you're not doing anything different to anybody else, then it's pretty hard to like justify, you know, charging 5x what they would expect to pay for getting a 1040 done. And so oftentimes the path to running a profitable firm is like the tax turn or the bookkeeping is how you get them in the door, but how you actually make money is all the stuff that you build around that. And so we never sold just bookkeeping. At a minimum we were selling controllership. Bookkeeping is like the classifications of the transactions as they come in each day. I think most people would say accounting is more like the producing of the financial statements and controllership is a little bit more looking at the systems, ensuring things are correct, but not quite getting into advisory. And so at least the vernacular we would use when we were talking with clients was bookkeeping versus controllership versus vcfo. Now how do you wade into advisory? You gotta be really careful here because most firms like we, we just give away a ton of expertise by not calling it what it is or you build the habit of having a little more of a conversation each month, then it grows and grows and before you know it, once 12 months has elapsed, the engagement at the end of it is completely different than the engagement at the, at the beginning of it. And like, like I, I do want to express that's awesome. That's actually the best possible thing you can experience because it means the client is pulling you more and more into their business, integrating you into to even more stuff. And this was always the goal for us. So I launched our, our CAST practice or, or managed accounting is what we actually called it in the client facing context. Kind of almost like managed it, right? Cause I wanted to be managed the carved out accounting department doing all that stuff for them. And the project would always start somewhere but we would come into it with the goal of growing that into more FTEs worth of work. Because when the client has a really good experience with us and this was, was almost always the case because they were benchmarking us against like private accountants that they had went out and hired or random admin people that they're trying to get to do accounting functions right, which never works very well. They certainly don't know how to build a tech stack to make this stuff as easy and efficient as possible. So they're usually super dazzled when we start doing that work for us. In any case, if they aren't, it's because we're just doing basic bookkeeping stuff. And that was where we always tried to steer clear. Ultimately we got to like we have to be doing some bill payer or some, some payroll in HR or some cash advisory or something like that. We have to be doing something more so, so that they are dazzled by that more impressive thing that we can do. And that then leads into us being able to take on more work. Because once they've had that good experience, you know, somebody in the office staff, they're going to leave or something like that, or they have an accountant that's going to leave or wants to go down to halftime or is going on maternity leave, who's the first person they're going to turn to? It's going to be us. Because we can give them more fractional support rather than having to go out and like find a new accountant and train them and that sort of thing. Like nobody, nobody's really in the business of doing that except for you and I, right? And so the way that I built my cast practice and who knows if this is the right thing or not, I built my cast practice around doing more for my clients, but like doing real work. And that's not to say that advisory isn't real work, but I never lean super hard into like quote vcfo. Because what all those businesses really struggle with is one, finding people that can do that stuff well is really, really hard. And two, if you get them on those big juicy engagements, all it takes is them getting three or four of those and they're like, why do I need you? I'm going to go do my own thing. And they got a pretty sweet cushy gig like advising a few clients at a time, right? Like near universally the firms that I talk to that push really hard on that, that's ultimately the problem that they run into. And so most of them do isn't like that sort of maverick sitting back in his big plush chair that has 30 years of experience and can just shoot from the hip and give incredible wisdom to. It's not that it's something a little more process driven where we may call it advisory and to say it is isn't advisory probably isn't fair because like how we advise can be systematized. But what they ultimately would call advisory was, was something more like on rails than I think we normally think of. When we think of vcfo often like I think most of us are thinking of that, that person with all the experience that can come up with novel outcomes. But the reality is most firms, if they are selling advisory, it's more selling a process which is great especially if you have a client within a specific domain and you can take them from a like powerful transition from A to B. Like that's really cool. That's kind of the goal. That's how you like really make. Hey, doing what we do is finding a transformation that you can enable for a thousand different businesses and putting that sucker on rails like that's, that's exciting. But I would, I would caution just generally wading into advisor because what that usually looks like, especially in the beginning is the biggest boss with the most constrained time taking on maybe some big dollar engagements. But you're ultimately the only person that can do that work oftentimes. So I know we're all being pushed to do higher value stuff, more advisory and all that. It's the only thing that's going to differentiate us from the AI apocalypse. Right. But I think there's ways to do this that are solving real like day to day meat and potatoes business problems of work that needs to be done where we can do it exceptionally well for companies who would rather not have to hire internally to do that work. And we're, we're using AI to improve these processes and we're sort of arbitraging some of those opportunities because we can bring better tech to a situation that may have in the past required three FTEs and we can now do it with one FTE and we're going to charge a lot of that value, but it won't require as many inputs from us. Like that's still the version of a cast bracket. That's still more interesting to me now. When we would deliver a set of financial statements, it would always be delivered with a video that was three minutes of their accounting manager walking them through what they saw there and any standout items and they would make themselves available with a calendar link. If the client wanted to schedule a follow up call, they could hop on a Call and dig into that stuff a little bit more. But nothing that ever like rose to the level of like we're doing like CFO type stuff for you. Now admittedly I don't have a ton of experience with that stuff, so I may not be the right person to ask to know, like here is the best way to roll that out. But the blocker for me that I still don't know the solution for is how to hire for that. We did some like kind of basic system system systematizing of more advanced reports that the accounting manager started working through a little bit more. And we did have a few clients that would pay for, you know, a standing 90 minute meeting once a month or something like that where they would sort of start going through these packages. But, but we were very careful to systematize it and this only really worked in like the more specific domains that we were serving because I don't think there's a great way to apply a single framework to any and all type of business. But actually the opportunity that this created for me as we did a little bit of it was raising the ceiling of what our accounting managers got to do. And maybe that's like a more organic like path into baby stepping into a little bit higher paid version of that work. But, but we were still a lot more excited about like the business like all of the things they needed to handle every day, from paying bills to paying people and how much they just didn't want to do that work. Finding opportunities to gobble that stuff up for them, like that was the juiciest thing for us. And so if you're thinking what do I do next? It doesn't necessarily have to be like the biggest brain advising. The more interesting thing is probably what's very specific to that type of business problem that we can solve. Something that's preferably more automatable or more staffable than bookkeeping or tax work where there isn't like this agreed upon price to it because everyone else doesn't do that work. Also when you come in and you solve that problem through the lens of FTE and they're like, we have one and a half people doing this right now and you can be like, oh, we can take this off your plate. Like that is a much more compelling way to set your fees than to say like, well, my buddy pays this for bookkeeping. Because we're not doing what your buddy's getting in this case, we're doing, we're solving a very specific to them business problem. And that client's going to be stoked. Anything you can take off of their plate that doesn't require them having to manage someone to do that, provide an office to them. Like, nobody wants to manage folks doing accounting. Like, business owners don't get excited about that. That's not what they go into business to do. Maybe that's a cold take on advisory. And there's people that are way better at it than me that would say, like, no, that's the first thing that you should go into. But that was just perpetually a really hard thing for me, for me to staff, and it was more a vitamin than a painkiller. What was really paining my clients was the stuff they were already having to do. Most of them had never had a CFO before, and they wouldn't even necessarily know what the value of that was. We could have helped educate them there, but the stuff we really went after was like, the painkiller. What's the stuff they just don't want to do? What can we take over for them? Hey, thanks for coming and hanging this week. You got any questions, pop them in the comments as we talk through this stuff. It helps everybody. So don't. Don't hold back. Don't be a lurker. I'll see you in the next one, Sam.