370 How To Make the Clients You Already Have Better!

Today. Is there a way to fix your existing clients? What if we didn't get rid of my clients because I do love them. I do like them. Is there a way to make them better? Better for me longer term? Or am I just lying to myself? Trying to. Trying to avoid having to do the. Trying to do the hard thing. Next cool story from. From a listener that they shared about. About a super quick and easy win. They got to pull in some new clients in a specific niche. Thoughts on the CMA and credentials in general and how and whether to transition your firm to subscription bundled pricing is the cool thing. It's the avocado toast of ways to charge your firm. But is it a good idea? You better believe we're gonna talk about it today. Come on in. It's Q and A. Jessica Spencer left a comment the other day. Jessica just spilled her oatmeal. Everyone always talks about getting better clients. I really enjoy working with the micro slash mom and pop and new businesses. I know everyone with experience says it's impossible. How do we make these clients better instead? Hopefully all the new tech will help. I got so many thoughts about that one. You love working with mom and pops micro bizzes. But they may not be great clients. And this all really boils down to how you obviously how you define great clients. And let me just start this by saying don't let anybody tell you how to run your firm. Okay? The whole point of being able to have your own thing is to be able to make it whatever you want it to be. Oh, what did you. What was it the other. I gotta find it now. So modern philosopher Alex Hermosi said the other day something along the lines of if you can't explain why it is you believe what you believe, then it's someone else's belief. And oftentimes we get sucked into like the collective group think of how to run an accounting firm because. Because honestly, we may not even know what we want. And I know that this is often a struggle for me as I'm curious about all these different things. But I don't really know what I'm going to enjoy until I do it. And even that evolves over time. But it's an easy trap to get sucked into running a firm the way somebody else tells you or in the way that's going to be most quote unquote, like impressive or in vogue on insert social media platform here when the reality of falling into that trap is you've now done the hard thing of going out to build your own thing and you're building it for somebody else. Right. Who was this again? Jessica. Sorry about the oats. But if you want to run a firm working with micro slash mom and pop new businesses, do it. You can do it. They may not have a bunch of money, but let's also level set on what quote unquote bunch of money is because you can run a accounting firm that will pay the bills and put food on the table with clients that don't have a whole lot of money. And so a big time trap. Here is our view of what a lot of money is and our need for a lot of money. It's oftentimes, you know, I'm making 80 a year right now, but these clients aren't gonna get me to 150 a year, which is what I really need. Do you really? I don't know that you do, because somewhere in that threshold, like in that range, is a crossover point where money's not really gonna have a big impact on your happiness. In fact, I think beyond that threshold, freedom is actually freedom of time, not more money. But too often we like keep growing for growth's sake to find more quote, unquote success and in the process lose control of our time, which is all that really matters at the end of the day. Right? Man, that's the only thing you can't buy more of unless you're Brian Johnson. Couple people like that joke just to like, get real technical about this. Is there a way to make clients better clients? There is. Like you can ultimately, the way that you engage with your clients will have an impact on how much they value what you do. And you can also straight up be a better advisor. Like, not all advisors are made the same, man. Isn't there a, a huge spectrum of how helpful a quote unquote tax preparer is or a quote unquote bookkeeper is? I mean, those two terms, like in their most strict sense, are so limiting, are so small in scope. So much so that I think even the people who would proudly say you shouldn't talk down about the, the, you know, the framing bookkeeper. I'm proud to be a bookkeeper. Or you shouldn't be talking down about a quote unquote tax preparer. I'm proud to be a tax preparer. Those people who feel those. That pride, they feel that pride because they're so much more than a bookkeeper or there's so much more than a tax preparer. A tax preparer puts numbers in a box on a form. We have software that is tax preparer A bookkeeper classifies transactions. A bookkeeper isn't even responsible for making the financial, making sure the financial statements are correct. The people who do that really well are great advisors to their clients. So the way that we interact with our clients will dictate how much do they value what we do, the stuff that we actually deliver. And these are two different things. The stuff we actually deliver will have varying levels of impact on their business. So for example, if all I do is classify the transactions in their, in their QuickBooks file versus taking over their back office and freeing up a half an FTE for them, those are two very different values and framing of values for what you do. Right. And if you're able to communicate to clients to get them to understand the value of what you're doing on an ongoing basis, they will actually see that. So the value that they assign to it is closer to the value that you assign to it. All of those things can make them quote better clients. But that whole, the whole framing of even just calling them quote unquote, better client almost feels a little slimy, doesn't it? Like we're trying to make them into something that they're not and like, like construed the wrong way. Better clients could be interpreted as clients with more means. And at the end of the day, like the quote unquote best for your business through the lens of, of pure capitalism and financial optimization, that that better client is a client who has lots of money to pay and, and also has a willingness to pay it to you. And the trap here, if you are going to say these are the people that I'm going to serve, I know that there's people upmarket from this that I could serve that would pay me more money and it would mean I could get the nicer trim package on my Camry. But the trap here, if you do stick with that client that is not financially optimized or however you want to frame that is oftentimes good clients can disguise themselves addiction as bad clients simply by not having a willingness to pay. And those are the ones you gotta watch out for, is sometimes you have people where they're just cheapskates and you're giving them a tremendous amount of value and they're gonna squeeze you and take it for as cheap as they can get it. And I'll be totally honest, I had a lot of those mom and pop clients who were cheapskates. And I could show them I can literally like solve this problem for you that is char, like taking huge amounts of time of your Employees that you're paying a lot of money. We can solve these problems for you, and you need to us this for it. And they're like, well, what if I paid you this to do it instead? And I'm like, no, that's not how this works, bub. So, yes, you can. You can, like, serve those people and stick with that. Just make sure that they're not taking you for a ride. Make sure that it's not because you're afraid to do the harder thing, which is maybe kind of an existential thing you may struggle with here is, am I. Do I actually really love working with these people? Because I just so much don't love, like, having to let them go or having to disappoint them. There were times in my career where I think I convinced myself of this. We've talked about this on the podcast before. This whole notion of doing low bono work and letting these. I won't say freeloaders is too extreme of a term, but letting these people just hang on to the client, hang onto your client list long after they're an optimal client for you. Like, you just like these people. You. You never spend a single brain cell thinking about what's best for these people, yet you leave them on your client list because it's too stressful to think about getting rid of them. If you're not thinking about these people, they will be better served by somebody else. We do have a lot of these folks that hang on to firms, and they're getting a discount and they couldn't possibly pay your current rates. Meanwhile, They've got an $800,000 home. Jimmy's in private school. Like, they can afford an $800 tax return instead of a $600 tax return. They're just not willing to part ways with that money for you. That is like low bono work. And that I'm just fundamentally not a believer in. And oftentimes similar to, like, watching out for convincing yourself. Oh, no, I just. I like. I like these clients better. Like, that might be the case, but it could also be you convincing yourself to do something that that's easier than the other harder thing to do. And I think people very commonly do this with low bono clients and they call it. We've talked about this in the past. It's maybe the. It might be the hardest punch I regularly give in the. Oof. Bone. The reality that low bono clients are not, quote, unquote, supporting your community. They're just not supporting your community is helping the people that have nothing to pay you. Not the people that have $600 for a tax term, but not $800. Supporting the community looks like a barbell approach where you charge top dollar for people that value you so you have more bandwidth to help people that most need you for no money because they have no money to give you. Like, if you really want to help the community, that is the best way to help the community. But I wouldn't take that so far as to say, if you have a type or a profile of person that you love working with, don't let anybody big boy you into the thought leadership Kool Aid that says, well, to run a more optimized business, you should no longer work with those people. You wanna work with those people, work with those people. It might come with financial trade offs. And so it's a bigger question of are those trade offs worth it? Also, keeping in mind, am I pushing to a level of financial means that's unnecessary? Cause honestly, most of the people that run in accounting firms, we are way beyond what's necessary. And if you could look back five years ago at the person who started that firm who's like, I just hope that I can make my W2 back. I just hope I can make my wages and they look at you now, that person will be like, what a little silver spoon. You're making so much more money than they could have ever imagined. Yet we're still like busting our butt to do more for some reason. It's a great question. Can I just keep serving the people that I enjoy helping? The answer is yes. And that is one hard part about one hard thing about what I do is I'm all about running the the smartest firm that you can. But as long as everybody's interests and motivations are different, like there is no such thing as one size fits all. That's why I have such a problem with frameworks for how to like the one framework to rule them all to run your accounting room. There's definitely stuff that's a bad idea and stuff that's good idea. But if somebody tells you how to run your firm, doesn't it kind of defeat the purpose? Yes, we want to pick and choose. We want to like, pull in the stuff to like understand best practices and learn. Like, it's not to say that you're always gonna know better than everybody else, but there's a line there where it goes too far and you end up running somebody else's firm. And that'd be a big time bummer. You don't wanna do that. 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 square, simplified, easy to use financial dashboards. Gonna feel super familiar for anyone that's that's used that Live Flow product before. Connects your qbo, your Xero 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 we can pull them into these like super flexible little widgets like in a, in a dashboard view you literally just share a link with the click 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. Scroll 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 Team up who helps you hire talented accountants in the Philippines directly. You're just, you're, you're paying the humans to work for you. It's as simple as that. Something I had great success with. I had four folks working for for me in the Philippines by the time I had sold my firm. Let me tell you the stuff that's just kicked off at Team up just this last week firm in Georgia looking for a senior accountant. That turned into team up. Team up then deploys their recruitment in the Philippines. They've got on site recruiters there that are pulling in talented people gang. If you don't know regional firms, Big four. Everybody has big old accounting offices in the Philippines. Like they are very talented folks over there. Another firm kicked off a search for a tax accountant. Oh, it's another one for a tax accountant just kicked off. Then another firm from Texas looking for a bookkeeper. I don't think I ever made any tax hires. I hired a bunch of folks for my casting from the Philippines But I know there's this weird perception that like offshore folks can only do the junior entry level stuff. Like no, anybody you can hire for like any role you can hire for in the US you can also hire for in the Philippines. Made a ton of sense for me. Um, if you haven't done it before, you're going to have a bunch of embarrassing questions. Go to Team Up. They've dealt with all this stuff before. Stop trying to figure it out yourself. There are two offshore staffing providers I promote in my content and every time someone tells me they use them, I say how did it go? And these two are still in my content because they're doing a great job for people. That's a better filter than I ever had when I was trying to make hires offshore. If you're thinking about it, check out Team up down in the show. Notes a cool story from Peyton Witt. Comment on bait and just spilled his oats Comment on a podcast. Great video. I found a niche that I'm interested in personally and have started a tax and accounting newsletter for that industry niche. I marketed in on Reddit and those channels and got way more than expected on Reddit people. How cool is that? So I clarified like paid acquisition on Reddit or just being helpful to people in there, he said. So I posted in a specific thread related to gunsmiths and machinists and said tax and accounting for machinists in the subject line in the post mentioned he's accountant, he's got a number of consults and like a bunch of new clients from that. How cool is that? You know, when we the big spookies around niching down and getting specialized like it's all framed the wrong way as this big dramatic thing. No, like specializing is that it's like this would be more fun for me, especially in a small firm if you're building it just around yourself, not around a team. When you're building around a team, you gotta think about the interest and capabilities of the team. But when it's just you and you're like, you know what, who would I like to talk to all day? Gunsmiths and machinists. I'm into that stuff. Could I just talk to those people all day? The answer is yes, because everybody needs accountants. That's kind of the best thing about this profession. Jobs. A helpful post on Reddit. Now you've got five or ten of these people to work with and it doesn't mean you got to burn your old firm to the ground. It still means hopefully these people are at least as profitable as, as the non niche work. And honestly, there's an argument to be made to where maybe it doesn't even have to be as profitable if you actually enjoy doing that stuff. Like the greatest competitive advantage you have as a human being is the thing that you will stay up at night reading about because you're so curious about it. When it comes to adulting, we do not find success based on natural skill. Like the kid in high school who's a fast runner. Like we are so far over the hill that long term success is a product of being into something for years and for decades. Because who ultimately wins in the adult sphere is who puts in the most repetitions. Who did that thing more times, put more money into it than anyone else would think was reasonable. Those are the people who are prolific at that thing. That's me on video. I put more time, more money into video than anybody else. Only for everybody to now be like, you're such a natural. That's just the reality of getting good in anything. And if you want to put in more repetitions than anybody else and it not feel like work. Because I don't want to get there by killing myself more than anybody else. I want to get there because it's something I enjoy. Maybe I'm super into golf, maybe I'm super into video games. Maybe I'm super into boat building. There's a path to building a specialization that is following the stuff you're into. It's the greatest competitive advantage you have is your interests. A lot of people say following your, following your dreams is the worst advice you could possibly get. Following the thing that you're into. A lot of people say don't make your hobby your job. I can understand a lot of the arguments behind that stuff. But if you go out on your own and start your own business and you do your own thing and you're in total control of your schedule and your life strategy is to actively avoid the things that you enjoy as a hot. Take that. That just doesn't seem like the move to me. Maybe I'm wrong there. Good for you, Peyton. It wasn't a, wasn't like a social media strategy there. It wasn't like, oh, let me make this machinist landing page. It's like, I'm just going to post this helpful thing on Reddit and he's, he's got a newsletter for him too. I love that. Crazy niche newsletters. Love that. Okay, thoughts on CMA is from T Bone. T Bone. T Bone just spilled his oats thoughts on cma? I don't have like specific thoughts on CMA so much as credentials in general. I've never really been a big credential guy and I'll be honest, a lot of these things, I think it's completely normal for people to be like, I'm not into that thing or you don't need more money or you don't need a credential when you have money or when you have a credential. And I'll be very honest. There's like so many things about the advice that I give now where it's like, yeah, but you wouldn't have said that until you got there. Like the whole machismo around like you know, building a 1.8 or 11 1/2 million dollar practice in 18 months and like how I ultimately didn't enjoy that. And I'm not super proud of it. Like, I mean, I think I can only say that because I'm on the other side of it and had I not done that, if I see somebody like me saying that, I'd be like, yeah, no, but I still have to do it so I can prove it to myself. And credentials are probably one of those things too where when you don't have a credential and you see other people have credentials and then you see people say, wow, look at that impressive credential. You feel like you need to get a credential. And I think that's only natural. And so I can only, I can only offer perspective from the other side of credential, Dom, as I have a CPA and I'm therefore extremely smart. I'll never forget how I felt after getting a cpa. I'm like, oh, this is, this is all they knew. I always thought they were smarter than this. Not a big credential guy. Even when you have a credential, if somebody is buying your services or engaging you according to your credential, you've already lost the battle because while you have elevated yourself above everyone without the credential, that's still a really big number of people. I want to be like one of three. I want to be like the guru in a specific domain. I don't want to be one of 10,000 CPAs or CMAs or whatever it is that they could have engaged. I think you've lost the battle at that point and you're not really going to be able to command much in the way of like premium prices for what you do now. Credentials are worth it when you want to do it. When you want the credential. And that learning you think will be valuable for you. That's a completely legitimate reason to get the credential. They're also legitimate if you need the credential to do a specific type of work, which is the case sometimes. But otherwise credentials are going to be the last thing I lean on when it comes to marketing. The way that you build a career as a professional these days is you pump value into the world so that folks then value you, not your credential. And I know that sounds super woo woo wow. Pump value into the world, gang. That's the reality of how the world works now. The fact that everybody spends their idle moments scrolling an algorithm. Even in the last 36 months. I mean, there used to be a reasonable conversation you could have around My clients aren't online. Really? Who's not online now? I mean everybody is online. Online is the newspaper. Online is everything. And if you are willing to consistently put value out there to a specific type of individual, the people who will engage you are engaging you because of that value that you put out, which by definition makes you one of one. That's the goal. That's how you win these days. And people are still stuck on I'm not an influencer. It's not being an influencer, it's being a 21st century professional, not 21st century. Wouldn't be the odds, maybe not even the tension. It would be being a professional in the 2000 and twenties. Honestly, there's no bigger opportunity than that. Just showing up and being visible because you can't will into existence the opportunities that that will afford you when those people see you every day. Today's episode is sponsored in part by Client Hub. It is practice management season. You know that you're looking around. Am I on the right platform when it comes to picking a PM? Client Hub says it comes down to the 4C's capabilities, client experience, clarity and community. Today we're talking about community. You know I'm a big old fan of Community. But is your PM platform, are they in the community? Are they excited about the profession? Do they participate in community events? Client Hub, it's a small startup that was co founded by a former firm and top 100 pro advisor who knows a thing or two about accounting firms. When you adopt Client Hub, you don't just get a practice management system, you become part part of a community. Ah. As part of Client Hub you can ask questions, get advice, share your perspectives, all with a welcoming community of small firm accounting professionals like you. It's not cold, cold, lifeless SaaS. It's a service the Client Hub delivers. That's more than just software. Learn more about Client Hub. 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 show. I'm going to do it. Carmen 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 gonna touch it because the tech stacks 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. Last one. This is a question from a podcast listener. Converting the mind mindset in our firm and our offerings to a bundled subscription model has been a struggle. What's the best way to go about determining subscription pricing when everyone is still fixated on the billable hour? A point of clarity here. Transitioning to subscriptions shouldn't always be the goal. Transitioning away from hourly pricing in most cases should be the goal. There's still some scenarios where I don't have a problem with hourly pricing, but 90% of cases, it's worth trying to get away from hourly pricing. And the reality is, when you're up against the man and the establishment and you're trying to move a mountain and you've got, you know, a bunch of partners who hourly billing is all they've ever known, they don't even know anybody that does it. Any different way for some rosy cheeked little knobby kneed kid to come up and be like, no, this is the better way to do it. Trust me, I saw it on the Internet. That's just not going to land well with folks. And so you have to one engage them with the thought leadership that led you to that conviction. So is there somewhere where they can go where they can learn from someone who will resonate with them? And oftentimes that's not going to be somebody like me. Somebody who's been in the profession 40 years is going to take one look at me and like turn their brain off. So is there, is there somewhere where they can go where they can learn value pricing or something like that? At least get a taste of it to understand that this is a legitimate thing that firms are doing successfully. But then get real tactical about how do we just get some easy wins here and baby step into it. Because if you jump straight to, you know, Orion Lazanus LinkedIn post about the best, most triple, a perfect way to price and bill all of your projects, that's like 20 steps of Kevin Bacon away from where those people's mindset are right now. And the goal needs to be like, how do I get them to the next step or the second or the third or the fourth step? And I can tell you how I did that in my firm because I had the same problem. 80 year old tax firm and a bunch of partners who had only ever done hourly billing and we transitioned in one year to putting 1600 engagements onto like a value pricing approach where they had to give us their payment information upfront. And then we auto pulled that money at the end. And the biggest blocker everybody has is, well, I don't know how much to charge them until I've done the work. This was in the context of once a year tax work and what we agreed, what I could get everybody to agree to, which this is, this is the most important thing to consider is is there a version of this that you can get everyone to agree to and it may not be perfect, it won't be perfect. And trying to make it perfect is probably what's gonna keep it from working. But what I did was I said, if I look at this whole portfolio of projects and I could tell you right now that it was gonna come through at this profit margin, would you be okay with that? Would everybody agree this is fine? And everybody's like, yeah, no, that's fine. And so you try to get everybody to buy into a more portfolio approach to how we make money on our work and some will try to split hairs over that being unfair for the folks. Some folks pay a little more than they should and some folks pay a little less than they should. Reality is, that happens everywhere in business. But what we did is we took what everybody had paid last year. We put some sort of increase on that. And their new proposal and the agreement that I made with the partners was basically, if this falls between 90% and 130% of what we expected, then it goes straight out the door and gets auto billed when it's done. So they had to give us a payment method upfront that we would charge at the end. But it was also the first time that they could see the price upfront, which is a big improvement because the last thing you want to do, send them a big old bill at the end and they will never even pay it. They just did all that work for nothing. So the clients could see the prices up front now and they appreciated that. We made it very clear that this price is assuming the same scope as last year. And the partners got on board. Yes, as long as it comes through within this percentage threshold of what we expect, then we're good. I, I don't have a problem with time tracking. I think the evils of time tracking come down to incentives and the pressure we put on people for time tracking. I'm a big time advocate of time tracking still. If I got a remote team, I want to know if somebody's putting in 90 hours and they don't want to or something like that. Like, I don't have a problem with time tracking. And what ended up happening that year was over 95% of those projects were able to get auto billed. And you know what, on every single one of them, we didn't know how much work it was going to be until we actually did it. But you know what everybody loved is all the partners. They didn't have to bill every single one of those projects. The clients, they loved knowing what the price was going to be upfront. Anytime we're changing something, people will fixate on what they're losing, on the risks, and that gets way more of the focus than the upside. But this was how I baby stepped the firm into something better. And that was kind of step one. After that, we could build on that, we could do more interesting things. We started offering, you know, different types of packages for those people that they had never been exposed to before, to let more premium people opt into more service and in some cases year round service. And this is where we shouldn't try to force subscriptions where they're not necessary. I'm totally into like the value of subscription business and how from a cash flow standpoint that's fantastic. It's actually why I like a big reason why I wanted to build a cash practice was just that year round cash flow is really, really nice. But if you're doing say once a year tax work, don't try to shoehorn that thing into a year round subscription unless value delivery is happening consistently throughout the year. It's just, it feels really forced, it creates some headaches and I don't think it's worth doing. It may be an argument to getting to where you are delivering year round service to your clients. Like if you can find a way to do that, the fact that it's then much more reasonable to do subscription offerings like that's a great upside of getting there. It's a little hard to do with tax work because most people don't need year round tax support. At most they need two tax projections a year. But even that if there's something you're doing for them every single quarter, say quarter one is you're filing things or quarter one is like an extension estimate and then maybe quarter two you're filing things. Quarter three is another tax planning session and quarter four is kind of the admin for the year for the S Corp or something like that. If you can even get it down to like here are all the deliverables we do for you every single quarter around the year. Like at that point then it's justified to do subscription pricing I think. But for a lot of engagements, I think in bookkeeping it's always appropriate to do recurring subscriptions before like tax work that's once a year. I wouldn't try to force the issue there to get folks on a subscriptions. But yeah, I think the biggest blocker for folks that are just used to hourly billing is they're so used to splitting hairs on every single project they're going to be one off projects where that's really hard to do to value price. Don't start with those because that's the very hardest thing. Start with the recurring work where it comes in each year and, and it's usually within 20 to 30% of what you would expect. And if you can get people to agree to those boundaries ahead of time because they're scared about where it can go off the rails and end up backfiring. But if you define the rails and you say would you agree to it if it was only within this. In this scenario we auto bill. In this scenario we do this or that. And you can paint the picture of this is why this wouldn't be problematic if everyone came through in this range. That's much easier for them to agree to. Especially if you can extend the upside of it's going to save you a ton of time not having to bill. So like find those little wins. Find a, find a, a reduced version of that that everybody can get on board with because that is going to be the foundation to be able to do better things. And it will take some time. And that's the hard part about steering a big ship and change management and a firm of folks that are like, used to things that is, you know, not the way you want it to be. Anytime I had people come and work for my firm, I was already doing thought leadership online and I'm like, I know you're coming in expecting the Starship Enterprise, buddy. This ain't it. Like, so don't, don't expect that. What I was doing was the best that I could do in an 80 year old firm that had a bunch of happy employees, bunch of happy clients to gradually walk it down a path of modernization so that we were better set up for attracting better talent and attracting clients who would pay like a more premium price for a higher level of service. But you can do it. Keep fighting the good fight. I did that for a lot of years and I don't regret it. For sure, there's upsides to doing your own thing and having total freedom, but it's also fun to do that with other people too. And it can be done, despite what people tell you. Hey, thanks for coming and hanging. You got any questions, drop them in the comments. Your questions make this podcast better, just like you do, just for tuning in. Okay? You make this a nice place to be. All right. Thanks for hanging. Sorry for spilling all the oats today and I'll see you in the next one.