366 6 Ways Firms Can Stop Trading Time for Money

Look at me. There is no more important thing than how you spend your time. We get so fixated on how we spend our money, on how we spend like our social capital, but we stop short of spending our time in ways that our investments in us and our businesses and things that actually scale solving the problems of everybody around us at our own expense. As somebody that makes stuff online where something like, like 14,000 hours a day of my content are consumed right now, as somebody who's been fully red pilled to like scale and leverage and things that work while you sleep, let me tell you, there is no greater compounding investment in yourself than finding a way to stop trading, trading those hours for dollars. And it's kind of what the entire professional services world is built around. Even value pricing is a version of this. So today we're going to talk about like just some mind opening ideas to shift your perspective to ensure that the way that we're investing our time each day is going to be in the best service of us over a 12 month time horizon, over a 3 year time horizon, 10 year time horizon. Because professional services has programmed us to just not do that. Very low leverage. Okay, let's do it, Come on in, let's talk about it. Foreign Most of this isn't about like firm specific things, although some of the later ones there's a bit of like service offering considerations. The biggest thing is, is you like the way that you think about what's valuable and what's not valuable and, and where you should spend your time and where the rest of your senior team spends their time. What you hire for, what you don't hire for. I am by most people's estimation, like I put out a really big volume of stuff and people say how can you, how do you have time? Daily pod, Are you kidding me? And the flip side of that, like what makes that possible is all the things that I don't do that most people do. So I don't take meetings, I just don't like. I get, I don't know, a lot of requests every single week, tens of requests of people, CEOs of like big impressive companies who are like, want to jump on a call? And I'm like I sure don't. And it's super cool and a lot of times it's super flattering. But I got to protect ultimately what I do that is useful and what has put me on the map and made me exist to these people in the first place. Similar framing that I heard recently. YouTuber named Airrack, he like super blew up a couple of years ago, said his YouTube channel blows up, people start inviting to all these cool, super impressive like parties where this is the sort of party everyone wants to be on the guest list. And he turns him down because the only reason he got that invite in the first place is his YouTube channel, is the work that he puts into that. And as soon as he stops focusing on that, then you're cutting out the legs of why they know that you exist in the first place. And every single week I have a list of examples of these things. Can he come talk to my firm? Can he come talk to this group? Can he come talk to this software company? Will pay you to do it. This is a stupid speaking fee. Why would you not do this? And the reason is just that the only reason that those people know that I exist in the first place is because I focus on doing that stuff in public where other people can benefit from it. And as soon as I start splitting that allocation of time, I'm then investing in them directly, just doing that stuff behind closed doors rather than investing in myself and leverage and building assets that I own that can still help people. But if I didn't do that stuff in the first place, if I took the first deal from a software company or a firm that came along or something like that and I got off the bus there, you can see how that's not optimized. And I would argue that actually there are like tons of things that we do every single day that are just this. They're not investments in ourselves or in our own business. And instead they're investments in somebody else. And when you're the big boss, this is the greatest gift you have in total agency. And being able to decide what you want to do with your time is make those compounding investments in you, in your assets, in the things that you own. And so the first tip I have for you, I got six things here. Number one is just the most rudimentary thing. Figure out how to have non negotiable time boundaries. Most of us don't even have this yet. You don't have control over your own time. Think about that, think about how wild that is. Our inability. And you may try to time block and oftentimes that kind of blow ups and you don't get to stick with it. Think about your journey through your professional career. If you own your own business, you're successful in ways that old you could have never imagined. And what's the result? A complete lack of control over what you do. That's I don't mean to be mean, but that's the reality of where most of us are. Just think about that. Think about what a bummer that would be like if you had a conversation with, with yourself pre, like finding this path. They'd be like, dang, that's a really nice Camry. And you'd be like, thanks. And they'd be like, I bet you have like all sorts of flexibility and control over your time and stuff like that, huh? And you'd be like, it's the EX package. See the chrome trim here? It's cool, isn't it? All this, like, big brain having these great ideas and all these things that you want to execute on the blocker to all of them is not having control over your time and not being able to actually decide like, okay, in my clearest of minds, when I zoom out and I look at all the different ways that I could spend my time, this investment in this, maybe it's making spending an hour on a video every single week, or a half hour on a podcast, or an hour writing whatever it is. When you're in your clearest of thought and you decide this is the best thing for me, how often does that thing just get thrown in the waste bin as soon as the rubber hits the road, as soon as you get that email from the client and you're like, well, I got to solve their problem today. That's step number one. We have to learn to have control over our time. I think the biggest, the biggest thief of our time is underestimating how many things that we have to do and under delegating and this whole like internal voice that's like, yeah, but if you get rid of that stuff, what will your value even be? What will you do all day, buddy? If you delegate yourself out of having anything to do? First off, not the worst outcome in my opinion. Second off, never gonna happen. Okay. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news. This episode is sponsored in part by Live Flow. You see the demo day we did on YouTube, yet live flow dashboards encourage you to check it out. It's all of a, I think a seven minute demo showing off Live Flow's new release. Super simplified, easy to use financial dashboards. Going to feel super familiar for anyone that's, that's used that liflow product before. Connects your QBO, your 0 to your Google sheets or your Excel, like immediately have this picker to be able to pull any old data from any of your connected client files. But now you pull them into these like super flexible little Widgets like in a, in a dashboard view, you literally just share a link with the client. Went through some cool examples in that video of like clients I had that were more like tradespeople that wanted mobile updates and I would text them something every morning. Man, I can make a little mobile friendly dashboard where they could hop in and as long as the underlying accounting ledger is up to date, they could see some really cool insights there that you customize yourself, templatize, turn that dashboard into a template and then literally just from a dropdown, connect another company or company consolidation and it populates the same dashboard with that different company data. Super cool stuff. You haven't seen that that demo day yet. Just go over to YouTube. How would I find it? I'd probably search Jason Live Flow Dashboards. Pretty cool release from the folks at Live Flow. Learn more about them. Check out the link down in the show notes. This episode is sponsored in part by Carbon, the practice management system. 2025 recommendations just went out. You better believe Carbon was on the list. Can I devote this whole ad read to their practice marketplace that they launched? I'm not supposed to do this, but this is my, my show. I'm going to do it. Carbon released maybe the smartest thing that I saw this year. And that's not an exaggeration. It is a platform for buying and selling Carbon. Firms like, and the only people that can have access are Carbon users. You go in, you see other firms that Carbon users have listed because isn't that such a huge part of doing acquisitions is tech migrations? Oh my gosh, do your tech stacks align? Makes a really, really big difference. And Carbon can make a pretty compelling argument as a result of this that your firm might literally be worth more if you put it on Carbon. Like that's what makes this so smart to me. Especially if we think about all these firms like aging out and everybody's like, I'm not going to touch it because the tech stack's awful. If a bunch of these firms modernize their systems came to Carbon, think about the marketplace that that opens up when all the other firms there can see what they're doing. And the notion of merging those things just got way easier. Even on the back end, they've got some cool ways to like, either combine those practices or continue maintaining them as two separate instances of Carbon. Super, super smart stuff. To learn more about Carbon, check out the link down in the show notes. Tip number two, your job as the the person with the most agency in your business and the most flexibility and control over what you get to do. The privilege of having all that is having the privilege to build things that work while you sleep. Sops, guides, blog posts, videos, writing a book. What are the things that will either scale your reach, your influence, your leverage? Whether you are sitting there plunking away on the computer or not? Think about the daily tasks that you do and how many of them are ephemeral. Something that in 48 hours time you will never think about again and will never help another person versus things that are an investment in one more person finding you, unlocking some new opportunity, raising your perceived expertise. I don't want to say this as a flex, but the reason that I do what I do now today is just this. Compare my day, what I do now to my day when I ran a firm. Compare it to the, the, the average firm owner's day, the amount of time I invest in building things that people will consume for years. Seriously. Some of my earliest, stupidest YouTube videos still get tons of traffic and I have no idea who any of those people are. But I'm giving value to people at scale, like I'm building relationships with folks. This podcast by and large has been developed to be evergreen. Most of the topics here are not particularly timely so that facts folks can go back through the back catalog. And when it is hardest for me to do this podcast is when I am talking to brands or emailing with, you know, folks that want something of me. When my North Star has to be. How can I take this super privileged spot that I'm in where, you know, like you, if you're running a firm like you have the financial success that you wanted, you're there, you've done it. Just like try not to ruin everything else along the way, right? Like that's kind of how it feels. Once you've got there, you've got the team, you get to make the rules, you've got all the control. But when it comes down to the nitty gritty of the things that you do each day, do any of them matter? Like, do they really matter? Or was it some trivial thing that somebody just needed and nobody's going to think about again? I am like super aggressive about trying to devote more and more of my time to things that will live on, that will help people at scale. And if you can get stuck in the trap of one to one client service and that being all that you ever do, that is, it's a very inherently low leverage way to go through life. Understandably, your reach will only ever be the clients that you Serve. And the people that they tell you like, about you, like their friends, they go out and say, like, yeah, no, Jim, he's pretty good. You could literally be the best person in the world at what you do and nobody's ever gonna know. And most clients, frankly, largely won't care because they don't have any way of benchmarking how good you are against somebody else. And this is where you can lose, honestly, decades sitting in a chair, working your butt off, not feeling particularly appreciated, because there's always going to be one more person that needs stuff from you. And on the one hand, that feels good. Like, it does feel good to feel needed. And I don't want to understate, like, the appreciation of like, wow, these people are giving me an amount of money that would have been inconceivable to me before to do this thing that I do enjoy. And there's maybe a part of you that is like, I just need to shut up and be grateful and just do this stuff. And I don't want to, I don't want to like, push things too far and feel ungrateful for that reality, how great and how special that is. But know that that mindset can also define your ceiling. It's breaking free of just doing that one to one stuff that redefines what your ceiling is. And it may feel like turning your back on being helpful to a lot of people that you care about. Take my example of having an accounting firm with 2000 clients and a team of 40 people that I had hired off of Twitter that bought into my vision of how to run an accounting firm. And then I turned my shoulder, like I turned my back on them. I'm like, I'm going to leave. Not because this is the best thing for you, but because it's the best thing for me. Just like, think about that. That was an incredibly hard thing to do. But had I not done that, I wouldn't help the people that I'm able to help now. The situation, like, don't, don't try to convince yourself that your situation is any different. It isn't that one client you're thinking about, that farmer that has that big problem, the business sale, whatever it is, that client, turning your back on that person, well, it doesn't feel great if it means you're opening yourself up to being helpful to even more people. Being helpful at scale, that's a worthwhile trade off to make. Okay, tip number three, as you are deciding how to spend your time, get a little more selfish consideration. What's in it for you versus what's in it for the person on the other side of it? Oh, speaking at accounting conferences, running a webinar for a software company, oftentimes. Oftentimes this stuff's free and you don't get paid at all. Sometimes you do get paid for this. I can tell you, though, the rates that most people get paid to do this stuff is less than a single client engagement, the worst imaginable use of your time. Now, if you have something there that you can promote, like, if there's another part of your business where getting in front of those folks is going to pull more people into your web, and that's helpful for you, great. But too often hopping on that call or doing that thing, you know, that person with the impressive CV reaches out and just wants to chat. It's okay to be selfish. Like, think really hard about, like, what's ultimately in this for me. I deal with this a lot with folks outside of our space who will look at, like, what I do in our space, and they're like, this is really cool. Can you come speak at our. Our big event that has nothing to do with accounting or come talk to me about this or that? And I'm like, no. Because honestly, what I'm focusing on is being helpful to folks within a very specific domain that's useful for me that truly helps people. That helps build my business, which is a media company, and then a private community where firm owners pay to be inside, that's about half of my business, and the media business is about half my business. And then, like, from a purpose standpoint, that's also, like, the value that I'm putting out into the world. Like, that is what ultimately is fulfilling about what I do is I'm actually helping people. But if I go sit in front of a room of dentists or marketers or something like that, and, like, I could give them a talk, that would probably be helpful and they would pay you for your time. But that's not ultimately an investment in what I want to do, right? That's an investment for them and what they want want to do. And I can let you in on a secret. Every single software company wants people who will come and develop stuff for their platform. And there comes a time in every talented person's life where they have to decide, am I going to build really cool for myself or am I going to build really cool for somebody else? My hope is that I can turn more people on to building stuff for themselves rather than others. And I think the reason why A lot of us don't. Is like, we're blocked by. I can't imagine this having value. Like, I can't imagine putting myself out there and building my own platform. Buddy, if I can do it, you can do it. And I know, like, I'm way far down that road, so it can feel hard to maybe compare yourself these days. A software comes to me and they're like, yeah, we're going to do this big, cool media thing. It happens all the time. We're going to do this big, cool media thing. It's like a, like a masterclass or like a, you know, the best sort of education channel in the, like, platform there is in the space. And they're like, yeah, you should come do this. And I'm like, I don't think you realize who's in charge here. I am the platform. Look at me, I'm the captain now. This is a game of. Of attention. Like everything these days, software, all of it is a game of who can command attention. I don't need a software platform to command attention. Why would I build that for you instead of build it for myself? Besides, people want to connect with people, not brands. Like, that's the. That's the greatest advantage you can have is being a person, being yourself, not be tied up in all these different ways. And there's a lot of people out there that are absolutely capable of building that same platform for themselves. Whether it's facing the accounting profession, whether it's facing beekeepers, it can be really flattering. Just got an email yesterday from a huge software platform that wants me to do a series of videos for them. They're like, you can even post them on your channels. And I'm like, this isn't true to what I'm trying to build. And like, my core audience. And like, I'm flattered, but no, thanks. When you get those emails, because you will. When you have those conversations, you could cash out. You could, like in the beginning. And there's probably folks listening to this who realize, like, I did cash out and I cashed out too early. But I think the way cooler investment is the investment in yourself. 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 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 condition. We want more business with impressive online proposals. No more hustling, hustle 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@ignitionapp.com put a link in the show notes this episode is sponsored in part by Client Hub. Recently did 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. And we're not talking about no diamonds. The third C you'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 can imagine spending time here. Client Hub is 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 1,000 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. Okay, tip number four Be helpful in public. Don't just be helpful behind closed doors. This is sort of the trap for professional services firms is we're incredibly helpful in private. And then you go out and you look at TikTok and you look at Twitter and you look at all the information that's out there publicly and you're like, well, this is kind of awful. The reason it's awful is all the good people are doing it in private. And if your favorite thing about being an accountant or an advisor is helping people and doing that stuff in a hands on way, you can still do that in public. Like that's kind of the game. That's good. Marketing is being useful, being like relentlessly useful. Not like filling the algorithms with fluff because goodness sakes, do we have enough of that already? It's having something to say because you know your stuff and putting it out there. So tip number four is be helpful in public. Tip number five, delegate in private. The stuff that's happening behind the scenes, that is the first stuff that you pull a team in for. In my case, I am more accessible to a random person who adds me on social media or comments on this podcast on YouTube than I am to sponsors that pay me a bunch of money. I don't hop on calls with them. I don't. In fact, I don't think I've had a call with a sponsor in over nine months. And there's a lot of like sponsorship money that has come and gone in that time. They don't get access to me. I've got a gm, Jake Kestnick, and anytime a brand wants to, wants to actually talk to me like a sponsor, then Jake's title changes from GM to head of partnerships and he hops on a call with them. I'm delegating what's happening in private so that I can stay super focused on what's happening in public. You can do the same in your firm. It's not just an investment in your business and it's an investment in you. It is not all that long that I've been doing this stuff. Not even five years now. I mean, I'm not even two years removed from owning my firm. That is not a long time horizon where I've built skills in video that will aid me until the end of my day. I can be sitting in a retirement home somewhere shooting videos, recording a podcast and it will all have started here. Can you imagine that? Dude, sometimes I think about what old folks home will be when I like what they'll be like when I get older. Dude, they're going to be like, it's going to be a bunch of nerds like Xbox system link, LAN party, college dorm. Like it is going to be, it's going to be great. That's all, that's all I can say is I'm actually very looking forward to checking into the old folks home. Okay, tip number four, be helpful in public. Tip number five. Delegate what happens in private. Last one, tippy. Top tip number six. Oftentimes it is as deceptively simple as finding the more scary scalable version of a thing. I'll give you an example for you and then an example for me. An example for you. Let's say you're thinking about waiting into advisory, but you're like, I'm gonna take a lot of my time doing these one on one calls with clients. I'm not gonna get that time back. Why does it need to be one on one? Could you pull three clients in at a time? 10 clients in at a time? It changes what that meeting looks like for sure and probably how much stuff you share. But trading one on one access for one too many is virtually always a good trade to make and is almost always actually way more profitable too. Like the people out there who can command a $250 an hour for their time. Can that same person make something that you can charge $10 for and get 25 people to buy it? I mean, almost certainly, right? We're so like captive to the, the service business mindset that we never think of what it means to just open it up and sell something to more people at a time or to productize something to sell it to like an infinite number of people. That's an example for you, an example for me, something we've been talking about. So I have two newsletters. I have a newsletter for accountants and I have a newsletter for software companies that talks about like how to better sell to accountants and AI stuff to implement into products, that sort of thing. My newsletter for accountants is free and I sell sponsorships on it. But ultimately in our space, there is a ceiling on what you can charge a software brand to sponsor one newsletter. Like there just is. Our space isn't, you know, the entirety of software everywhere. So like there is, there is a ceiling to how much you could command for a newsletter sponsorship in the accounting vertical. On the other hand, my newsletter for software companies is paid. They pay to be on that list. And the revenue from that newsletter, I can tell you right now, it's not much. It really isn't. I haven't been right. I've been writing it for like a month. But if you look at all the things that I do in a week and you try to attach a dollar value to it. Oh, it's not, it's not a big dollar value right now. It really isn't. But you know what? That thing doesn't have a ceiling. And so today you could say, oh, my time would be better spent just writing a second newsletter every week for accountants. And we've got plenty of sponsors that would pay handily for that and that short term view. It's just that it is. I could go take, you know, two or three hours to write another newsletter. We know what we can get for that and we'll get paid that right away. But that's not what we're doing. What we're doing instead is a different newsletter. People have to pay to be on that list and that list has no ceiling. It's going to take time to build. It'll probably be, probably be well over a year before that crosses over the threshold where it would have been more worthwhile to just write another newsletter for accountants. But that's like me investing in a channel for myself and it. And it is a privileged position to not have to like squeeze everything that I need to out of it right away. But that's just a fundamentally more scalable version of the same thing that won't be as sexy on day one, but as an investment in me and in my business. Right. So for any of the things that you do, like what is a version of that that requires no added input from you, it could be your sales process and you developing scripts for the sales process. It could be, rather than doing masterminds, developing a product where clients can can come in and go through this sort of training course. Or maybe you do a cohort based thing twice a year and you take up to 40 clients through it and you do like group coaching with all them. They learn how to read financials, whatever it is, but it's still fundamentally better than the one on one version. Right. The next time you go and give a talk, maybe you only agree to do that talk if you can record it and then put it out into the world. Or if you can record it and put it on a podcast, or you only agree to go on to somebody else's podcast if you can post that podcast interview on your own podcast feed. Nice. You just made the thing that people can go out and consume for years. Take something that would otherwise be low leverage one to one and just find a way to make it a little bit higher leverage, even if it's just one to three. And in the beginning it's probably going to be less valuable. And honestly, you're going to suck at it. Like the first time you try to make a product. Oh, you're going to put like months of planning into it and it's going to be so much work. It's going to be the big old things to be 10 hours long and nobody's going to buy it. And then the next version you're going to do, you're going to knock out in a weekend and it will be half the price, a tenth the length, and people will buy it and you'll be like, oh, I just wasted like 4 months. Way overthinking version 1. Version 2 is a lot better now. I've got a little bit of traction still. Definitely not worth my time on the surface, but I got a skill and I can see where this is headed a little bit now. Right. That's what it's going to feel like. Like it is a new thing that you're learning. But the alternative is kind of. Kind of being a tradesperson, which, to be clear, like, I don't think there is any shade in being a tradesperson, but that is a more representative analogy for running a service business. For most, like, that's what it's going to be for most people. They're going to sit there and they're going to do the work without stopping, to pause and zoom out and see what the Internet has enabled over the last decade and how that actually really ought to impact the way that we put our expertise out into the world. So many opportunities out there. Every time you see a stupid post of bad tax information, bad financial advice, the only reason that there's a void that filled is because the person that actually knows what they're doing didn't fill it first. And that's a big motivator behind me producing content is I looked at the content that was out there and I'm like, this is not very good. This is either boring, it's not good advice, or doesn't feel authentic. To the way that I see what I think the right way is to run a firm. These days, that void existed and stuff filled it that I didn't like because I wasn't putting my own stuff in there. And that's kind of the cool thing about social media algorithms. While they are far from perfect, they may be the best meritocracy we have in society. Then that kind of suck. Like, that's. People like to say, like, the algorithm hates me, I got shadow banned, all these different things. Look around, try to climb the corporate ladder. Nothing's a meritocracy. Being able to go out there and help people and be useful and people responding to that. Like, there's something actually really satisfying to me about that. And while it isn't perfect, it's a whole lot Better than a lot of the ways that we have had to grow to business success in the past. I would challenge you to think, how am I spending my time right now? Is there something cooler that I could do? That may not be super lucrative in the beginning, but it is like building a new muscle for me that I could see becoming exponentially more powerful over time to unlock something more fun, higher impact, more challenging. I tell you what, anything to get us out from behind these desks. Oh, I've been putting a lot of work into the ol. Can we get personal here? This might get weird. We'll see if we cut this. I'm putting a lot of work into the old body this year. Not even this year. The last three or four months. My gluteal chain is granite. There is no flexibility there. You talk about touching your toes. I have to wear longer socks just so I can get to the top of those. And so I got serious about, like, man, you're 36. You're not getting any younger. I'm, like, over that threshold where, like, you're losing muscle every year and things are just getting worse, and so you got to kind of start fighting back against it, right? Boy, I feel like I'm grand scheme of things, not incredibly old. I like to think anyways. And I feel like I'm undoing so much damage that 15 years of sitting in front of a computer has done, from, like, my posture and getting my head to, like, not be craned forward all of the time to being able to bend over and pick up something off the ground without my hamstrings snapping in half. You want to talk about more important things to do? Whip that big old accountant body into shape. Man, it is worth doing. It's great for your brain just getting out from behind the desk. Highly, highly recommend. Okay, we're obviously done here. Hey, thanks for coming and hanging. I'll see you in the next one.