372 The Community To Help You Build an ‘Autopilot’ Accounting Firm

We got a treat today, boys and girls. Probably like the OG Internet.

Think person in my opinion. Ryan Lazanus.

We're talking communities this week. He's had a community for like three or four years now. Super cool place. I send tons of people to his community. Ryan in my mind. And we'll. I will see if he agrees with. This is like the systems guy. Do you want a system from like A to Z how to run the.

Best small firm that you can? Like, he's got a system he's been working on for years that, that works.

Cause he's got a ton of people in the community. I know a bunch of very happy.

People that use his system.

So wanted to pull him in here to learn more about his community. He's also just a fun guy to have a chat with like, like me. He's like, I don't know if he likes it. He does the online content stuff and has written newsletters. Knows a lot about that. Knows a lot about running a community, but also knows a lot about running an accounting firm. And so should any of that stuff even inform the way that we run an accounting firm? Like one to many services, that sort of thing. We're going to talk about that a little bit too. Let's get. Okay, Ryan, if somehow someone hasn't met.

Ryan Lazanus before or seen you in the wild, what's like the 32nd Lasannis intro?

All right, Jason, thanks for having me. And 30 seconds. I'll try to keep it to that. CPA. Born and raised, Montreal, Canada. Father of a four year old triathlete. That's what I do in my spare time and professionally I had a CPA firm in Canada. It was one of the earlier cloud firms in North America. Took that from scratch to sale in just five years and then wanted to help others avoid a lot of the common pitfalls that I went through running that kind of modern firm. And started Future Firm Accelerate. Sorry. Started Future Firm as a blog, as a newsletter, a podcast, just to give actionable, practical, helpful tips to help firm owners scale and live a life of freedom. And then started Future Firm Accelerate, which is the system to help firm owners scale, supported by community life coaching and self paced training. Yeah. To help firm owners run a great business.

You.

I, I didn't know you're a triathlete, first of all.

Yes, I got into that a couple years ago. Yeah, I like to stay active. So I was getting bored of. I was doing CrossFit for like almost 10 years and I was getting bored of that. And Wanted a new challenge and discovered, I don't know, even I started triathlons just like as a stupid bet with a friend and he was supposed to join me in like the first race and then he bailed and then I did it and I ended up liking it, so I just kind of continued. And yeah, it's, it's a lot of time. It's a lot of time during the week, but it's pretty rewarding.

You were like one of the og. I think of you as like the.

Original accounting online think person. Like in the, in the sense that we think of them now.

The blog, the newsletter, like the normal sort of combination of things.

Right. Like, you were doing that when I.

First even started getting on social media. That would have been after you sold your firm, presumably.

Yeah, pretty. I, I knew as soon as I sold what I was going to do next. Like before I sold, I knew what I wanted to do next and I wanted to like, help advance the accounting profession because I've always been so frustrated with like the archaic business model and the, the lack of support that we've had for modern firm owners out there. And I was just very frustrated and I started talking about that online. My company really just started as a blog when I started Future Firm. If you go to my very first blog post, it says why I'm starting a blog. And it literally was communicating that I had no clue what I was doing other than maybe just journaling my experience. And I had like a newsletter sign up form on the site. Like, I don't even know why because they didn't have a newsletter. But people just like saw that blog post and they just. I got like hundreds of people signing up right away. I was like, okay, well, I guess I have to write a newsletter now. And I just started writing a newsletter Tuesday, 7:40am Eastern. And I made that the cadence. And I've barely missed an addition since I started in 2018. So yeah, I just. And in my previous firm, I led with content as well. That's how we got most of our clients, was through blogging. Didn't have a sophisticated strategy, but it worked out back then because, you know, not many were doing it. So I just kind of emulated that with Future Firm. And then that's how the audience built up. And then, you know, a community off the back of that.

So that would have been like 2015, like somewhere around there.

Well, I sold in 2018 and started a future firm in 2018.

Oh, 2018. Okay.

Was there anybody else? Like, there weren't many People doing blogs.

Or stuff like that Back then, were.

There not, like, the type of content like that I was putting out, where it's, like, actionable, practical content to help you run your firm? So I think it was a different kind of style. I'm sure there was other people doing it, but there wasn't much cutting through the noise. So I was just really focused on making, like, helpful content that people can use in their daily life when it comes to running a better business.

Yeah, there's definitely an abundance of, like, content from.

From software vendors, and a lot of it's very good, but it's also, like, inherently biased. Looking at the state of things today.

Do you still see there being a shortage of, like, independent thought leadership in.

The same way that there was back then?

No, I don't think there's a shortage. I think there's a lot of great creators out there, a lot of people that are putting out awesome content, obviously, like yourself, people to look up to, for sure. But yeah, there's the, The. The. The bar is raised 10x from what it was in 2018.

Okay.

So the bar is very high right now. There's a lot of good content. Even a lot of the software vendors, they've really upped their game. The content they're putting out is really good. So then how do you cut through that noise? You know what I mean? So you have to kind of elevate and try different things and try different formats and. Yeah, content marketing is tough these days.

Do you still recommend that for people, like, somebody that wants to be an advisor to firms? Like, what would you advise them?

I recommend it if you're. If you're. If you're. If you're comfortable. If you, if you. You have to kind of have some kind of enjoyment when it comes to producing content, because you got to do a lot of it and you have to be very consistent with it, and you got to stay on schedule. I think that's very important is the consistency. And yeah, I mean, there's. You got to put a lot of. A decent amount of stuff out there at a pretty high quality, and that gets hard to do with time.

100%.

I'm sure you. You have. There's some. I'm sure. Yeah.

Okay.

I have. I have to say I don't know how you do it sometimes, Jason, so good for you.

Yeah, thanks.

Okay. Community stuff, since that's what we're here to talk about. How did you get to. So you're right. In a blog podcast, thought leadership, you.

Were on, like, I remember going to the webinars. You were on all sorts of stuff.

But how did you get to a community? Like, why a, a quote unquote community.

As, as you would have defined it then?

Starting a community was actually never really the objective. The interesting thing about being an accounting firm own, you get to see a lot of cool businesses out there and you get to see the numbers behind them. So I remember I saw like one, you know, like I was already in the process of like starting to think, you know, am I selling my firm? Am I continuing? What am I going to do? And I saw like one business that was like, I think she was like a hairdresser that quit being a hairdresser that started producing online courses on how to be a hairdresser or how to cut hair. And she was like bringing in a million bucks with like one virtual assistant. I was like, wow, this is like, what an amazing business. You know, I mean like it's never going to be $100 million business. That's not really what I want. But here's like seven figures. She recently started it and it's all profit. I was like, that's, that's, that's. I think that's super cool. So I started thinking about like, how could I like, you know, I want to help the accounting profession and how could I develop like online courses that would, you know, teach them something. And at first I thought I would be teaching them purely on technology, purely on process improvement and automation. That was one of my strengths. Strengths, like you know, six, seven years ago. And anyway, I like started developing an idea. I started joining like, I started learning about online businesses. I joined some online business communities and I saw like, there's one community that I joined called Super Fast Business and it had like a coach in it and he had supported his coaching, like, you know, asynchronous coaching with like courses and like a community forum. I was like, wow, that's like the perfect combination. Because, you know, people could help each other, you could provide some kind of leveraged coaching and they could rely on the courses that you've provided. And it's a very leveraged business model. It's a very scalable business model. I just thought it was the perfect combination. Self paced training, coaching when people need it, and peer support in a community. So I always wanted to lead with the online courses and have the community kind of rally around the content to help each other out, reducing my need to be involved so much in the actual advice giving. So that's kind of how the community started and then like I launched it and I saw, wow, the community is actually the sticky points. And that's when you know that, that, that, that was the stickiness, you know, like people can consume the content in a day at two days if they want to binge through it. But the community is what they stay for. So that's when we kind of started making a bigger shift on the community aspect of things. That being said, I think we're still like, we're still the system to help like people sign up because sure they want the community, but they also want to work less. They also want a more systematized firm and we're providing with a step by step system that they can follow to achieve that end. And then we support that with peer support in our community from firms from around the world, which I think is pretty cool. And you know, live coaching where I have like a monthly ask me anything call and there's a variety of other ways that members can get help as well.

Before you were doing some coaching, before.

You had launched that, right?

Yeah, I was doing one to one coaching primarily to understand the market. So like I had a firm of my own and I thought I knew certain things and certain things that I thought were obvious to me weren't obvious to others. So I actually started as a technology and process improvement consultant. Like my first few engagements, like the first few ways I made money in future firm was like one to one consulting. Let me look at all of your processes, all of your tech stack, all of that and then let me issue this hideous 60 page report on like recommendations. And I just like I hated doing it. And what I also saw was that some firms were coming to me, they were like super overworked and they already had like all this cool automation in place. And that started getting me thinking, okay, like technology is great, but there's a business model that has to be fixed here. And that's when I started getting into okay, the pricing, the packaging, the marketing, the, the team building, all that kind of stuff which I think made my firm a success, which I kind of glossed over and to just focus on the technology side. So yeah, future firm accelerate now like is is more focused I'd say on the business model fixing rather than the technology and automation side of things. So yeah, I did start as a consultant.

Where do you see coaching plugging in.

Like because I think a lot of the folks that haven't like had that community experience before, probably the same people that haven't had a coach before. Like most firms.

Where do you where do you see those things interacting?

Yeah. So I think like coaching can take a variety of formats. Right. You could have the traditional coach where it's like you meet with them every so often and you know you're able to share what's happening in your life, what's happening in your business. And a coach can give you different perspectives and lean on their experience to kind of open your eyes to different possibilities, abilities or options. You know the type of coaching that I've always gone through, I've had numerous coaches in the past where I'm more of that asynchronous personality. Like I don't want to do calls, I want a completely clear calendar and I want to respond to you when I want to respond. And my coaches have actually been asynchronous. So you know, I want someone where I could like send over a document, send over a video loom video, send over a message and then they could respond with their thoughts. So that's kind of the coaching more of the coaching that I was doing like early in future firm I was doing more of the traditional coaching then merged it into the more of the asynchronous coaching. I've kind of weaned off of that and now I do more of the leverage coaching which is like a monthly call with, with our members and whoever wants to to join can pick my brain could use me as a sounding board, can jump on a live portion of the call or we can talk through their challenge together. So you know, I've, I've had the opportun do this with hundreds of firms now and I get the most pleasure out of the asynchronous more group leverage style of coaching at the moment. But also in the forums like I'm, I actually take the role of a coach in the forums as well in the community. So like I'm active in the forums, I'm active in the community, you know, providing different perspectives or different, you know, providing guidance in certain areas.

This episode is sponsored in part by Live Flow. You see the 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 Flows new release. Super simplified, easy to use financial dashboards. Going to 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 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 want a 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. Today's episode is sponsored in part by Ramp. Do you know Ramp is maybe you maybe do, maybe you don't. Ramp is a spend management platform. Do you know what a spend management platform is? Maybe you do, maybe you don't. These are kind of cropped up in the last like three to five years and I actually think accountants are extremely well suited to bring spend management platforms to small businesses for the first time. And it is all about like better card hygiene, not using one card for everything, not having an office card, you know that, that Jimmy runs out and uses for donuts. It's about using virtual cards, putting budgets on cards, how you manage those budgets across your team members. It is about enablement of your team members to give them greater flexibility to go out and do what they need to do, spend money with boundaries. And Ramp rolls all that stuff into a super tidy platform. And in the last year or so they've been investing in their account accountants channel big time. You'll see him at all the conferences. Super mature product. Now sometimes we're afraid to like put that new thing in front of a.

Client because it may embarrass us.

Ramp is like triple a very, very nice product if that's a problem for your clients. Also, spoiler alert unlocks a whole bunch.

Of bookkeeping automation opportunities as well.

We've done a demo day for Ramp if you want to see like a five minute demo on my YouTube channel. Otherwise, learn more about Ramp down at.

The link in the video description. We were talking before we started recording about how like there's some kind of community overwhelm and folks like, don't know where to turn. But Jeff, good number of accountants now that are members of multiple communities.

Do you see folks do both coaching and community, or do you think it's.

Kind of an either or thing?

Well, I mean, we certainly do that in our, I mean, we certainly see people that are joining on the monthly calls but then want to involve themselves in the larger community. Like, certainly they want to do both. The peer support, I think is very important. I think it's, I think it's necessary. I mean, I'm obviously super biased, but I think, like, why reinvent the wheel? I mean, a lot of the stuff I've learned over, over the years have been from forums, have been from communities. You know, when I was learning how to do certain things in triathlon, I went to the triathlon forum. In a previous life I was a DJ and that was when they didn't have YouTube and I had to learn how to DJ through a peer community forum. You know, a lot of things I've learned in, even in business have been through community forums. So I like that format. Maybe it's not for everyone, but it's an easy way to connect and share information and yeah, so. And yeah, there are a lot of communities popping up. It really reminds me of when I had my firm, Zen Accounting, when, you know, in 2013. I was one of the earlier cloud firms out there and it was super easy to get clients because nobody was doing it like that. You were pretty much one of the only ones. And then, you know, when I launched Future Firm Accelerate, you know, you were, you, you know, realize was in existence. But beyond that, what really were the options? Now we definitely see a splintering of that. We see members in multiple communities, but we also see members that are, you know, finding their own niche community because we're seeing a lot of niche communities pop up. Like, you know, there's a community specifically for virtual CFOs. There's a community specifically for, you know, firm owners that are just starting. There's a community specifically for those that are seven or eight figures. There's a community specifically for those that are very tech oriented. Right. So certain, like, people will find their own way. But I'm, I'm seeing this as like, it totally reminds me of what I went through when I was like, early on in cloud accounting. That, yeah, there's a lot popping up, but there's a lot of, a lot more options for members as well.

Where do you see that playing out longer term? Any thoughts on like, what does that look like five years down the road? Like, does it just continue getting more specific, you think, or does it go a different direction entirely?

That's a very good question. I think, like, yeah, I can't say for certain, but we're seeing things get more niche, more specific, and I see us probably heading in that direction. What is it going to look like in five years? I have absolutely no clue. I just know that there's a big market out there, you know, so it's a big market there's a lot of room for. And I also think that there's a very small percentage of people that have actually join the community, and I think we'll. We'll see that percentage increase at a much faster rate in years to come.

Yeah, I think we're like the people that listen to my podcasts and the folks that read your newsletter, I think, are still such a small part of the profession. We're in this little kind of echo chamber of thought leadership. And even, even within that, you have a small subset of people that I think have explored communities. So it seems like it's very, very early days still.

A lot of people just like to consume the free content, and there's nothing wrong with that. A lot of people get a lot of value from the free content, whether it be from, like, my newsletter, your podcast, and they'll cobble together their own solution. I think you can accelerate your results with a community, with peer support, but ultimately, you know, that's just my opinion. And, you know, so I don't know where I was really going with that. But I think, like, there's a lot of free content out there. There's a lot of great content that people could learn from, but I think we can dial in with a community and you can learn a lot faster that way, 100%.

So for, you know, where your community started out to what it is now, and kind of the formats and the programming. And just what does that look like when somebody comes in? Like, what should they expect? What are, you know, the monthly rituals or the weekly rituals? What does that look like?

Yeah, so what we want to do is we want to give firms a quick win. Like, we're appealing to very busy people. And, you know, my whole approach is how could we systematize your firm as quickly as possible? And by systematizing your firm, we give yourself the opportunity to scale while being able to step away from the business. So that's what I want to do, is I want to help systematize that firm. There's a lot of things that go into that. But what are the big levers that we can pull very quickly? How can we pull those levers when someone has very little time on their hands? So that's kind of the, you know, what we're always looking to do is make the content as easily digestible as possible and start off with some quick wins. So that's really what we do is like, we introduce the system as we say, you know, we know that you're probably, you're looking for a certain kind of lifestyle. We know that there's things that you've tried that might not have worked in the past. And we want to do a little bit of belief shifting in the beginning by saying, like, here's some of the things that like firm owners, here's some of the typical pitfalls firm owners typically make, and here's how we can avoid this through, through the system we're presenting to you. And then step one of the system is one of the big levers that I think we can pull in a business to see quick results. And we want to get them into that step as quickly as possible, completing that step as quickly as possible and utilizing the community forums and the ask me anything calls as support for when they need some additional help. So that's really what we're trying to do is we're trying to get someone as ingrained into the system as quickly as possible to realize some quick wins so that they feel good about themselves, they know it's possible, and they want to continue in the program. So that's, that's really the first thing we're starting with, is getting them into our system.

I try to kind of tease out.

Like, what is there an avatar that's particularly suited for one community or another? And I know a very common talking point is working working in the business versus working on the business. And I think there's a lot of accountants that just want to be accountants and like, just want, want to do the thing. And the only time I'd say that's problematic is when maybe they want the other side of it and the upsides of the other side of it without being willing to do that. Right, but would you say that, like, what you're doing, you mentioned, you know, being able to step outside of the business.

Is that at odds with the person.

That wants to do the work still, you think, or.

Because what I mean by that is you need to. Nobody wants to be working 80 hours a week, even if you're the one doing the accounting. The books, like, I don't care what kind of role you want at the company. Like it's, it's up to you. I don't care if you have a one person, $100,000 firm and we have members that are happy with that, or if you want to be a hundred person, eight figure firm. I really don't care where you are on the spectrum and we're not trying to push you into any direction. We want to help you clarify what your objectives are and create a pathway to that objective. If you love doing the nitty gritty details and the books and the accounting and the tax, go for it. There's a cap at what you can achieve with that in terms of like revenue growth, a revenue level without working yourself into the ground. So you have to be cognizant of that. But I really don't care how big you get. It's all about creating your own roadmap to get where you want to be. So yeah, it really like, I think freedom is an important theme for us. We want people to live a life of freedom. We want people to be able to take vacations. Before we were recording this call, we talked about the importance of spending time with our young kids and like maybe ending work early. Like, we want people to have those opportunities. And the reality is that a lot of firm owners out there, they don't have that. They, they don't have that freedom. They don't take time off during the year. They're stressed out, they're always maxed out. They don't have time for their family or kids or you know, the big occasions in their life. That's what we want to do. We want to help people get that.

You've got an interesting perspective as someone that's done the, the content stuff, the.

The newsletter, the community, but also having.

Had like run a firm and knows what goes into that. Let's say you were to run a firm.

Let's say you were, let's say you.

Were to Launch Lazanas Firm 2.0, Lazana Stats 2.0.

All right, let's do it.

I did not commit to this. Would what you've seen around running community and content and all of that, would any of that and even your, your.

Proclivity for like asynchronous work and that.

Sort of thing, would it inform like how you build an accounting firm?

Because I think people are thinking like.

What'S a more one to many version.

Of running a firm?

I think you've talked about that. I've talked about that on my podcast. I would 100% go that direction? I think would be challenging. I don't even know if it'll work, but I would definitely go in that direction where I would want clients to be empowered to do. And it would only be like a certain type of client this would work for. But how can we get them to do some of the stuff? How can we get them to do. Actually a lot of the stuff and tax returns is probably the. I don't think we can get them to do that, but I think we could certainly get them to do the books. I think there's a lot of stuff that we can. We can like, you know, courses, community, you know, some, some expert support, monthly subscription type thing at like down market. I think there's certainly something that could be done there. I've seen some firms try to implement that and I haven't heard a whole lot of success, but that's probably where my head would be at.

And so you're thinking more like not.

Fully done for you, but down market, more like assisted. We dare call it that. Like, like something a little more diy.

Would you build a community in your firm? Like you've got. Assuming you've got the, the community muscle. And I've talked with people too who.

Have tried it and it's kind of petered out.

But given that you have that skill, is that something that you would actually do?

The only value I would see to the community is being able to connect business owners together for some kind of referral type, you know, like helping business network to refer business to refer business back and forth. Otherwise I don't really see the value. Unless you're like in one particular niche. Right. Like let's say you're just like an E commerce firm, then it's like a community for E commerce business owners. Then that would make sense. That would probably make the most sense. If you're like very niche and have like one industry that you're focused on and you have like decent volume of clients, then it could make sense. Then there's. That's. I think that's a good value add.

Yeah.

Because the community is as valuable as.

The peers are valuable to each other. So like, you have to have that specificity for them to be helpful to each other.

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 advisors 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 Steps so to Sponsored in part by Cloud Accountant Staffing, who helps accounting firms work with talented accounts in the Philippines for the first time. Origin Story of Cloud Accountant Staffing A guy named Jordan was running a cloud accounting firm team of about 15. This story may feel familiar to you. Like most firm owners struggle to find onshore accountants and after having four consecutive offers rejected in 2020, was burned out on hiring. Oh buddy, if you've ever hit that wall, you know what that feels like. That's when he turned to offshore staffing companies for help. Although his experience was not a big success, he realized there was like something to it.

The underlying people were great.

So he started building his own offshore hiring pipeline in 2021. Now his accounting firm has nine full timers in the Philippines. Light bulb went off and cloud account staffing was born. Now he's doing the same thing for other firms. Like it's as simple as that. The number of slimy DMs I get from. Maybe I shouldn't say slimy from random people I don't know anything about on LinkedIn offering their services. I can tell you Jordan is literally just a guy that runs accounting firms. I don't know. I don't think he still runs his firm, but that was how this whole business got started. Was he just.

He just started doing it for other people?

People who have all the same questions you probably do if you haven't done it before. So if you're feeling blocked on hiring heading into next year, give me a shout Cloud account staffing link down in the show notes.

Actually she's got this question over email.

Yesterday, but what is do you have any thoughts on like what is just.

A service line that I could bolt on that's just slightly more leveraged than me just doing that work.

Like is it getting five clients onto a call once a month rather than doing a one on one call and going over financial statements like is there.

A slightly more leveraged service line you'd recommend?

Slightly more leveraged service line. It's tough the one to many in a firm because we're dealing with like confidential information. So like how are you going to share reports? How are. I don't think anyone would be comfortable like you looking. Okay, let's look at your numbers and like I'm not sure what that would look like other than like a coaching type call. You know. So it's like, you know, you're on the bronze plan, we're going to give you a coaching call. But it's like 20 people on the call who could ask kind of questions or you know, so it's a coaching service or a strategy service or whatever you want to call it. And like the gold package is like a one to one and like the bronze packages you can tap into my brain but. And ask questions. But you're on a call with 10.

Others as an example and your, your.

Mind goes to that being a down market thing more so than an upmarket thing.

You think that that leverage type service you just said. I don't think that necessarily needs to be down market because most people aren't even doing a call anyway. So like we're going to give you a call on each package, a quarterly call, monthly call, whatever you want. But the difference is the premium packages. You get one to one with me and on the bronze package then it's a one to many and like most firms aren't even going to do strategy calls anyway. So we're giving you this when most firms won't.

It's interesting. I'm. I'm obviously fascinated by just kind of general creator business things. And you see masterminds that people will pay absurd sums to be in.

Yeah.

And you look at the people behind the masterminds and you're like what is, what's like the core capability that that person actually has that them suited to run that? And you're like it's the network. Probably it's just the fact that they're the one that knows all those people.

But then you look at what accountants can do and you're like man, there's got to be some version of this where like you have such a foundational skill and you see into hundreds of.

Businesses like in a way that's really.

Unique and nobody else does that is.

A good, that would be a great service. I mean, it takes a certain skill set, I think, to execute that well, like, if we're bolting that onto a package. But I think that could be great as well.

You ever gonna run an accounting firm again?

I give myself a 98% chance. No. How about you?

I think about it. You know what I. You know what I worry about, though? I don't know if you deal with this at all. I worry that if I did, it.

Would be because you just wanted to.

Like, you know, prove something, which is a terrible reason to do something.

That is. I think that's probably. If I think, like, I do think it comes into my mind from. From time to time, like, maybe I could do it like this. And that's probably the reason why I would do it. And as you said, that's totally the wrong reason, probably.

Okay.

Any other. Any other community questions I should have.

Asked or context, you know, about your.

Your community for folks that are like, I want to go jump into one. I just don't know what anything else you would add to the discussion.

I think ultimately it just comes down to the vibe you get. Like, there's a lot of options out there, and it comes, you know, the vibe you get from. I think it just comes down. Most communities out there are giving some kind of, like, money back guarantee. So I think you could just hop into a couple, see whatever feels good and. And go from there. So ultimately, you want to be able to connect with a group of people that you mesh well with and that suits your vibe. And yeah, I would probably take advantage of, like, those money back guarantees. I think most. Most communities out there, they're. They're not. We're not seeing, like, a lot of refund requests taking place. So I don't think we. We. We mind terribly if someone actually requests that. We're not, like, flooded with these kind of things. So, yeah, I would probably just like, sometimes it's hard to understand the value that we can actually get from being in that community without actually trying it out for ourselves. So maybe just try it a couple and see what meshes well, meshes best with you.

That's good advice. You touched on this earlier. The. I could tell you the people that I send to your community are the people who turn up and are like, can you just show me how to do it? Like, can you show me, like, xyz? Like, I feel like my. My impression is, like, that's for those people. Like, this is probably the place to go because you're coming into a. To A system is that. Would you agree with that?

I. I would agree with that. I mean, we are bringing other experts in to give different, like, flavors as well. But, like, we have a framework that you can follow, and people are generally following that framework. And it doesn't mean you follow it to a T, because some people like to make it their own. But I think that's generally what people are joining for is they want, like, they want the framework, they want the system, they want the templates. They want to just. They don't want to figure things out on their own, and they want peer support when. When they. When they need some help as well. So. Yeah, and so I think that's like, the different flavor we have from most of the other communities out there.

And I can say if it's me.

Like, if I'm still running a firm, like, there's like, when I got a.

Full cup of coffee, I mean, I'm feeling good.

I'm like, no, I could do any of this stuff. But what's.

What's really appealing to me is, like, the insurance of I could probably hop.

In here and, like, grab these scripts and templates and, like, go through the process.

And that probably just saved me, like.

Six years of, like, zigzagging on all these different things, for sure.

And I mean, like, I look at, like, realize, and I'm a member of the realize community, you know, I see, like, there's like, I got your email today, and you said, I have 28 demos in the platform. And I checked it. I was like, why would anyone not be part of this? Why?

Why?

Like, you're looking for, like, a new practice management software. Why would you, like, evaluate this all by yourself? Like, do you know how much time that takes? I remember when I did that for my firm, it was a nightmare. It was an absolute nightmare. Why would you, like, not save, like, all this time and just get this library of demos and just go through it? Like, I don't even know how long. Two hours? What is it? I don't know. And then you'll make your choice from there and, like, ask questions in the forum and you'll select your software in, like, a tenth of the time. I think a lot of firm owners aren't valuing their time enough. The ROI on that is massive. You know what I mean? That's one thing that I always find surprising is, like, I'm not sure if I want to do this. I don't know. I have to think about it. I've been, like, playing around with this for the last six months, for the last two years. Like, it's all there for you. You know what I mean? There's, there's, there's a program or community that has solved all this stuff for you. Like, you just have to tap into it.

Yeah. Well said, Ryan.

Thanks for coming and doing this.

Really appreciate you having me on. Jason, thank you very much.

Thank you to Ryan for joining. That was a lot of fun. Ryan's got a community, obviously. I'll link that in the show notes. Also, super recommend you get on his weekly newsletter. Like, it's some of the best thought leadership in the profession. Very focused, very tactical. I'll put a link to that in the show notes.

It is, it's really good stuff that you shouldn't miss.

That's it for today. Thanks for coming and hanging.