375 Inside My Accounting Firm Peer Group Community!

Okay. Continuing the theme of talking communities, today we're talking about my little old community realize launched it in 2021. It's ultimately the thing that let me like go out and do content online full time and we still welcome people into it with open arms. So today I'm going to tell you like the background of it, how my community works. I am so bad at talking about my own things and it is so very uncomfortable. But we're going to do it anyways, so come on in. Today I'm going to tell you just a bit about what I think is the coolest peer networking community in the game. So we're gonna get to like what does programming look like and the day to day in the community. But I think the just straight off the top, the biggest difference about the community that I run compared to the others that I others that you see is the community is not about me. The community is about making like your next best friend in the profession. Because that was always the most useful thing to me. I love thought, leadership, content and big ideas and all that stuff. But the most energizing thing that ever happened to me in the course of running an accounting firm was meeting other really cool people who ran accounting firms who were like minded. Running. Running a firm can be a very isolating thing. Doubly so if you don't have anybody else in your life that does that. And like I've told the story before of, you know, how my wife is incredibly supportive and you get home at the end of the day and she's like, you're so good at this, you're the best, you're doing great. And I'm like, thanks. Like I guess it's better than you saying the opposite. But you don't really know at the end. Like I might suck at this stuff. You're just, you just propping me up. And while that support is super valuable and I don't want to cheapen that, what proved incredibly valuable for me was having a network of peers that run accounting firms that I can bounce ideas off of and can recalibrate my normal. Like having those other relationships gave me an intense level of confidence in the hard decisions that I would make in my firm where otherwise I would sometimes let my clients take talk me out of something. Like when I have those relationships with other firms, I'm like, no buddy, this is the norm. And I know the norm better than you do because I know a lot of firms and the result was just kind of greater confidence in my entire journey and a massive acceleration of my journey that all came from the cool people that I met along the way. So kind of the origin story of where this community sprung up from. It is arguably the first of its kind. Maybe Thrival was the closest thing to this in 2021. What you see with a lot of communities and none of the communities that we're talking about this week and next suffer from this. But what you see, because there's been a massive explosion of online communities the last couple years. And the wrong way to approach a community, is it be like a fan club or to get you additional access to a person? Because I don't care how smart somebody is, you have more to learn by the collective intelligence of a smart group of people than you do any single guru. And one thing that I think we got right from the beginning in my community was just that it was a community first sort of thing, and it was all about enabling touch points between the people in the community because they have more to give you than me. And so the initial premise of how we launched Realize actually stemmed from the COVID era on Twitter really was where it was hottest. This was maybe the peak of Twitter, tax Twitter, and accounting pros hanging out on Twitter. We were headed into Covid Relief, and it was just this unbelievable time where we had never been more in demand with our clients than we were then, like, almost by the hour in early days. Covid, when we were dealing with Eidl loans and ppp and every country had their own version of this. But Idle Relief was so complex that for whatever reason, everybody turned to their accountant to help them lean into this stuff, which I'm not complaining. I actually love that that is the default for most SMBs. But isn't that weird that it's the accountant's job somehow to, like, go out to the SBA and figure out you're letting all these different things. I digress. So as this stuff was unfolding an hour at a time and there wasn't a ton of information, and we're kind of having to read between the lines to figure out what to do, the super smart accounting pros and tax pros on Twitter were just like, so far, so, so, so, so, so, so far ahead of the curve. And even on stuff like erc, which took years to ultimately unfold and then, you know, got massively abused in the end. Those folks on Twitter were so ahead of the curve on. On everything, ERC included, on the right ways to do things, that it became just a wildly unfair advantage to be plugged into the conversations that were happening there every day. And at this stage, I own the firm with a partner. We still had two other partners that were very, very involved in the firm that were, like, early days of being phased out. And so when we were kind of, as a firm coming to decisions, it was four or five of us, basically, that were trying to work through this stuff together. And very quickly, I developed an absurd level of both confidence and expertise in every single thing that was coming down the pipeline to a degree where everybody was like, I don't know if you're just like, a really irritating, know it all. Like, it feels that way, but also everything that you're saying is right and ultimately being proven out to be correct. And, like, the people around me could not understand, couldn't comprehend the seemingly superhuman level of connectedness that I had, because no volume of research that any one person could do would lead to, like, the clarity of understanding that I developed from being in contact with so many other smart people that were doing research and sharing this stuff on Twitter at the time. And, I mean, it was in 2021, it was even worse than it is now. And you tell them where you're getting all this information, and they're like, oh, social media, Twitter? Yeah, no, that's where the smart people are hanging out. And people still say that today, I would argue, is even worse. Three, four years ago, nobody takes social media seriously for it being, like, a source of. Of good information. And the people I was learning from were people that I knew and people that had already proven themselves to be reliable experts. It wasn't random people just cropping up online, and then you just take what. Whatever they have to throw out into the ether. But the result was this acceleration of my capabilities that was unbelievable. Meanwhile, 99.9% of the profession is all trying to figure all this stuff out on their own in a completely siloed way. You think about, like, the few little tidbits of information in the places and the instructions that we're all, like, gathering information from and all trying to decide, what. What do we do with xyz. Just think of the volume of work that everybody's doing in parallel to each other with no crossover, no transparency into what other firms are doing when we're all solving the same problems. And this just, like, fundamentally rewired my brain to think, like, how many tens or hundreds of thousands of accounting firms are there? You know, tens of thousands in the US but potentially hundreds of thousands globally, where we're doing the exact same things in completely siloed ways. And that was the original impetus of realize, of launching this community. And I still remember it was one of those things. There was a total YOLO moment where I was like, this seems like a really good idea. And in way too short of a time, I made probably too much of a commitment where I'm like, we're gonna do this. Here's what it's gonna be, and here's the day it's gonna launch. And there's obviously a lot of risk to that, committing yourself to it. But also, I would rather bias, and this is where maybe I differ, I think, from a lot of accountants, is I would rather be biased towards overaction than be biased to inaction. I very frequently spin stuff up. Like, I have a. I now have a paid newsletter for software companies that sprung up in the last couple of months. And it's like, it's going all right, and I don't know if, like, there's a very good chance that in the next month I'll kill it. And, like, that happens all the time. I will try stuff out. Some of it's going to stick, some of it's not going to stick. The job placement thing, we are working our butts off to place accountants, like progressive accountants in my audience into progressive firms. And there's a humongous amount of interest in it. We've had hundreds of people on both sides of that equation, from firms to applicants who are like, yes, help me find a firm. And it's been an insane amount of work vetting every single one of these people and making introductions and all that. And it is. It has proven to be so hard to make those placements and get people to commit. So it was an idea that was super compelling. The whole Jason Careers thing, where it's still up in the air, like, are we actually going to do this long term? Because right now we're not placing enough people. Like, it's just not happening. I don't know if we just don't know how to run that business. Obviously, there's loads of recruiters out there that make this stuff work. And doing that matchmaking within people that consume my content seems like such a higher context way of doing, quote, unquote, recruiting, right? Like, how could this not work? I can tell you we're not placing, like, enough for it to be worthwhile. So, like, I'm. I have always, I think, been biased towards, like, doing too much. And as long as you pair that with a willingness to kill things when it's very clearly not going to work, I would Rather be biased that way. And the community very much started that way. And it started as it was literally a Twitter thread that was like, I think I'm gonna do xyz. Here's a little interest form if you want me to notify you when it goes live in basically 30 days. And the interest on that one thread, like greatly exceeded my expectations. It went really, really well. Had it not, it probably would have never happened and started in this itty bitty tiny way. And at the time, nothing like this exists. Like, there is no reference I can put my finger to. Like, the platforms for this stuff that are now very mature, they did not exist. In fact, even circle the leading platform for this right now. Launched two weeks after I had made that announcement. And the premise was just a slightly more private space for us to do more collaborating, because I think the more that firms can work together, the better. The more we can share ideas, the better. A lot of this had been kind of percolating in my head. After going to a couple of accounting conferences and having really smart conversations with people, I was like, how can we just get more of this? It's not enough to go to a conference or two a year and talk with other smart accounting firms. Like, if the answers we need can be unlocked by accounting firms, that needs to be like a weekly thing. Like, I constantly need to be in touch with other smart firm owners. Once or twice a year is not enough. And that was kind of the idea is like, we just need to have a. A space where we have more touch points. And the launch series was a, like a program that I put on over eight weeks. And, and so initially, how we got people in the door was my thought leadership. But ultimately my job was to prove to them. Over those eight weeks, I attract really smart people, or at least people that align with my vision for how to run a firm. Who's to say if we're actually smart or not? But at the very least, I'm like a lighthouse for a specific type of person running an accounting firm. And the most valuable thing that I can do for you is not just give you my thought leadership, it's to give you access to other real, really smart people who are tuning into the exact same thing that you are right now. Like, just think about that as you're listening to this podcast. Something like 1300 people will listen to this podcast on the first 24 hours after it goes out. You know how many answers and unlocks exist within those other 1299 people listening to this. That, in my mind is the most valuable thing that I can open up for you to, not just my thought leadership, but somebody has to be the hub. Somebody has to bring all that stuff together. Right? And so my thinking of what my job is in my online community, it was this way from the beginning, and it's arguably even more this way now. My job is to do two things. One, to find the leading thinkers in the world on specific domains of accounting firm running. So, like, who are the very smartest people I can find? And I go out and I will do 20 plus conferences this year on four continents. I do interviews everywhere you can imagine. And so I just have, by the nature of what I do, a larger surface area to be exposed to really smart people than people do who actually have jobs and actually run firms. Right. Like I'm going to have access to more of those people. And in the process, as I'm really impressed by somebody, I'm like, well, we need to pull this person into the community and run some sessions for us. And so I'm sort of the aggregator of really smart folks like that. That's my first job, to get those people in running sessions. My second job is to attract really smart collaborative accounting firm owners. And that's the biggest and best function of all of my content, is to attract folks who don't take themselves too seriously, who have a balance between I want to run something that's impactful, but I don't want to run myself into the ground. I want to create a cool place to work. I want my firm to be representative of what I want the future of the profession to look like, not what it's been the last few decades. And as I attract those types of people, those people being able to connect with each other through that common thread of finding my content that is, in my opinion, transformative. I mean, we've seen everything from a whole bunch of acquisitions have happened from folks that came together via my content, people hiring other people, other communities springing up, a number of them we're hearing from over these couple of weeks. And I think what we super need to hang on to as thought leadership and like accounting celebrityism I think is kind of growing like those, those sort of micro influencers, which is great because, boy, like, I started doing this stuff because I couldn't put my finger on a single person that I was really impressed by or really inspired me. You know, Lazannis was probably the first one there, the cloud accounting podcast guys, because they were still first getting started, they paved the way a bit. But at that stage of My career, I mean, I'm like 30 years old and I'm like, I see all this thought leadership out here, but man, it sure doesn't align with the way I see the world and the future of remote work and asynchronous work and technology and all that. And so I went out and I started creating the stuff that Jason minus five years would have needed to hear that was. That's kind of my North Stars. Like, what is all this stuff that I needed? But as, like, accounting celebrityism continues to grow, the one thing that we can't lose sight of is that the smartest person in the room is the room. It's the people you can get into the room. And so the folks that have really intelligent things to say, they're attracting the most intelligent people. And, you know, intelligence is not linear. Like, I should caveat that with the folks who, like, share your perspective and your goals for how to run an accounting firm. Like, they're going to attract the most relevant people for you. So a good example, Brandon hall, who, I don't know what the publish date will be, but we're going to hear from him talking about his community for larger firms. I think it's. As I'm recording this, I think it's going to come out early next week. Brandon hall is, is a big, sweaty firm runner, a big sweaty growth guy. He's actually, I would argue he's actually cooling off on that a little bit now. And it's. I think his kids have forced him, forced him in that direction, which was absolutely the case for me before I had kids. Like, all I wanted to do was build and grow, grow accounting firms. Pretty cool, right? I know. Anyways, he is more on like, the growth end of the spectrum than, than I am. So he's a great example of like, he talks about growth and, and approaches that stuff in a very different way to me. But because he is so visible, he attracts all the folks for whom that's attractive for all the folks for whom they want to do that same thing. And so like, the highest and best value of Brandon is not Brandon. It's all the people that he attracts, all the people he becomes the hub for. And as we're like, dazzled by Logan graphs, YouTube videos, and, you know, all these, all these different things, like, we, we can't lose, lose sight of that is actually the greatest value of being a hub person. Like, that is how you bring all those folks together. And from the very early days of running my community, like, I've been very clear and it even says on this one landing page that exists for it. It even says, is this the way to like, get more access to Jason or be friends with Jason or something? And it's like, no, it totally isn't. And. And, you know, like, the probably the biggest question I get from other people, people who run communities, is they're like, man, I'm burning out big time. This is so much work I'm having to run so many sessions and all that. And the trap is, don't set yourself up to be the genius. Like, people don't go into my community to learn from me. They go into my community to learn from the people that went into my community. Because you have so much more to gain from them than you do from just, like, listening to more Jason. Does anybody in this world need more Jason? I don't know if they really do. This episode is sponsored in part by Live Flow. This is the season, the season of giving thanks. And you know who I'm thankful for? Live Flow. Live Flow was one of the very first sponsors I ever had on my content. And they've kind of been with us from the beginning. I'll be honest, I don't know why people must be going to liflow from our content, which is great. But I'm thankful they've been there since the beginning because it's brands like that that honestly, like, keep this content coming. Now, LifeFlow, they started out as like a killer spreadsheet plugin for your Google sheets, your Excel sync data out from your QuickBooks files, your Xero files. Now they've got like a whole dashboarding platform where I can do the same thing, connect it up to the ledger, make these quick little dashboards can be either super basic, even mobile friendly, or like big, comprehensive, you know, multitab sort of monstrosities. It's pretty cool. Pretty easy to set up too, like, unintimidating. We did a demo day video maybe a couple months now on their new dashboard functionality. It's actually got a load of views, but check that one out if that sounds interesting. And thank you to Live Flow for being a friend of the pod. Today's episode is sponsored in part by Ramp. Do you know what RAMP is? Maybe you. Maybe you 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 them 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. Now a couple things that we've learned since launching in 2021 that we're really doubling down on now. One, the biggest and most impactful thing that we've done of any of the types of events and sort of recurring things that we've done. The juiciest one is mastermind groups, which mean different things in different contexts. And basically what our mastermind groups were is we would match you into groups of six or so and we try to make those groups as contextual as possible. So same firm size, same service mix, same region generally so that you have a small group that you meet with for two hours once a month. And all those people run very similar firms to you. And the reality is those mastermind groups in the community, they had a chance of being your worst community experience while also having a chance of being your most transformational community experience. Now they could be the worst because oftentimes we don't have any coaches or anybody overseeing these groups. They're self governing. We set them up, we help them to schedule their first time to meet and then we let them go. And because people get busy, they don't always follow through. And so sometimes these things can fall apart, which is super frustrating. But when you've got a good group and when that goes well, I mean we've from mastermind groups, we've seen like mergers, so many people that have made like truly their new best friend in the industry coming out of These groups. And honestly, if, if there's one thing that I wish for you to happen over the next 36 months that I think will change your life more than anything else, it is to make a true friend who does what you do. Like, that's so, so powerful. And so the, the best outcome for those groups is there's literally, literally groups that still meet every single month who started meeting three years ago and now they have, you know, gone to do in person things and hang out at conferences. And, and so the, the, the very best thing that we ever enabled for people, I think, is these mastermind groups. And that's informing sort of the direction of the firm long term, which I'm going to circle back to. The other big thing that we have learned and that we're doubling down on now is like my job as the runner of the community is to create as many possible touch points in the community as possible. Like one problem with it, with the community getting too big is all the events you join are end up feeling more impersonal. Like you get beyond six to eight people in a session and there's a subset of 20% of people in those meetings who are gonna run the whole meeting and it'll be the same people every single time. And until you get below like six to eight people, you're not going to hear from the entire room. And that's just an unfortunate reality of personalities in any room, whether it's virtual, whether it's in person. Like you have a meeting beyond what's the Bezos thing. Like you never need a meeting, should never be bigger than number of people that can, you know, one pizza can feed or something like that. And it's because beyond that threshold, all you're gonna hear from are the same people over and over again who most want to be heard. And so oftentimes the community can start pretty small and intimate and everybody can be engaged. But as it grows, you lose that intimacy and you kind of lose what makes it special. Right. So along the way, the ways that we connect people need to get more specific and something that we've piloted the last couple of months and we've got a couple more of these types of events coming up in December is actually a really cool extension for Zoom called Twine TW I N E. It's a little rink, a dink company. And there's a free version of this, this Zoom extension, but it basically gives you a whole bunch of different ways to do like automated breakouts. So in any Zoom session, you can create what, what Zoom calls breakout rooms and then manually assign people to those different rooms. Or I think you can also upload a CSV of attendees that has the association of what breakout rooms you want them to go into. But it's kind of a fuss, especially if you have a large number of people. What we're doing with twine is it gives you a whole bunch of different ways to like auto shuffle people into groups of different sizes. And so an example of what we did last month with a couple of events was we put people into groups of, I believe it was four, and they got shuffled into two groups and into three different groups over 60 minutes. And so the problem you always have when you put a bunch of accountants into a room is it's uncomfortable and you don't know who's supposed to talk and you don't know what to talk about. And we tried to, to unpack every one of those things as specifically as possible. So you get shuffled into a breakout room, you know, about three minutes into the session, everybody comes in, there's kind of a brief intro, we click a button and everybody randomly gets put into these groups of four. And then the person running the Zoom meeting, which is either myself or my gm Jake person running the Zoom session, can share their screen to all the breakout rooms. And that screen is a slide, that is who's supposed to be talking and what the prompt is. So literally like every three to five minutes there's a new slide, a different person supposed to be talking with a different prompt. So the entire thing is on rails. You don't have the loudest people commandeering the whole conversation. Everyone gets heard. And regardless of whether this is a 900 person session or a nine person session, the breakout rooms, the size of the room in which you're connecting with other firm runners is the same. And the energy coming out of these initial sessions that we tested was like off the charts. And something really magic happens when you get such a specific type of people together in a space. And like we, we will run meetups at conferences. And so at QuickBooks Connect, for example, we'll have like 30, 35 people turn up to a breakfast from the community. And the vibes are off the charts. Like, everybody is so excited. And me as the event runner, I'm like, well, I feel some pressure, like, oh, what are we gonna do? What are we gonna talk about? And it's like, no, you just get everybody together and they have the time of their life. That's all you have to do is just get them together. And so as like those in person events have been so powerful. We're like, how do we replicate this online? Because I think we're all getting sick of, of online meetings. And these days people just screw around and send emails while they're on these meetings anyways. And it's almost like background noise. But it's like, how do you create that like foaming at the mouth excitement of like being there and connecting with other people that you get when you hang in person? And that's where sort of the idea for these smaller groups, the rapid fire sort of round robin sessions came from. And the energy coming out of it was, was very much like that. It was like, that was so fun talking with those people. I wish we had more time. And really the goal of a session like that is for you to meet somebody and then like connect with them outside of this. Like, what I want from that community is you making friends that live outside of that community. Like you go and you hang out in person, you go on trips, you go to conferences, you email each other, you hop on zooms. So like in a perfect world, the nature of that event is pretty rapid fire and pretty compressed by design to keep things moving. But the best thing that can happen there is you're like, oh, I gotta circle back with Arthur. Or oh man, I'm gonna send a message to Tina to see if she wants to go deeper on that financial sense thing that we were both geeking out on. Like, that's the very best thing that can happen from a session like that. And so where our community's going now is leaning more into those types of intimate settings where you're getting more touch points with other people like you. Leveraging honestly the best thing that I can offer you, which is access to other people like you, but then pulling the specificity of those masterminds into the entire community. Because one thing that's always been an anti goal of realize is once it gets beyond a certain size threshold, it loses. It loses the magic and the specialness of it being a small room. You have too many people in the room. Like it just changes the vibe, right? If once everybody doesn't know everybody else's name. This episode is sponsored in part by Core V. Hey, we're closing up on year end tax planning season renewals. Oh, you want to get some better paying work buddy Tax advisory. That's where it at Corby. It is the most mature tax advisory platform out there. From identifying saving strategies for your clients to presenting them in a way that they will actually understand and pay you top dollar for like framing the savings in a way that makes you look valuable rather than just doing a whole bunch of work and like planner CS or like BNA or something like that and then just telling the client here's what we did and here's the extension estimates. That's. That's not framing your value up in a very positive way. Corvey, in my opinion is is like the most premium tool out there for doing this. If you want to trade in the mill of just pumping out tax returns for something better, something more valuable, buddy, that is tax advisory and software, the right software is going to make that much easier for. To learn more about Corvi, check out a 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 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. They're turning to Team Up. Team up then deploys their recruiterments 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 don't 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. 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. So what the community is trending toward now is really like the whole thing being a mastermind, basically. So you have a community that we had originally we capped at 500 members, but even 500, and the thinking was like, oh, we get bigger than that, it's kind of going to get lame, right? But even at 500 members, people are still anonymous. It's still too many people in many ways. So what we're doing is we're breaking that down more contextually based on what are the services you offer? Are you a tax firm? Are you bookkeeping firm? Do you do both? Do you do advisory? So first, your service mix. Second, the size of your firm. Third, what are your growth ambitions? Do you want to grow or do you want to do better? Like, do you want to kind of hold station and refine even? What practice management system do you use? So in fact, those four actually firm size, service mix and PM now in the community, are actually visible alongside anybody's name anywhere they post. So immediately when you see a post from somebody, you know, how big's their firm? What's their service mix, what's their pm? Because how many times have you seen a post from somebody where you're like, that's kind of weird. I wonder what that person's context is like. Do they actually run a tax firm? Do they use carbon? Is that a tiny solo firm? Is it, Is it a big firm? I wish we had this everywhere, anywhere that accountants talk. Those immediate little, like, signals of, here's this person's context as they're posting this. That's actually incredibly valuable. And like, you can understand when they're saying that coming from that, that avatar's perspective, this is how they would answer that question. So every time you read something from somebody, you're actually learning not just about, you know, running accounting firms in general, but the perspective of someone who runs exactly that type of accounting firm. And that is such a more enriched way of learning from peers when every single statement has that context. So we're building context into everything that the community does and beginning to organize all of the members into more intimate spaces based on those contexts. So like, you know, tax only firms for solo operators, tax only firms between 350k and a million, you know, just firms over a million, over 2 million, whatever it is, we're beginning to like, segment out that community so that you have more intimate sort of neighborhoods. Like, not like small groups of six, like the Masterminds. But you have small enough spaces where you hang out to where no one is anonymous. Like now it's not so big a number that people can hide or not contribute. It's much more intimate but also more contextual. Like the people that you connect with there have a ton in common with you. So the conversations that you're seeing and you're having are the most relevant conversations to you because of that specificity. Now if you go to like an accounting conference or you go out and you talk on social media, it's anyone and everyone, right? And so like, what ultimately is the value of a more specific community? It's being able to surface that context, I think. And then within that man, you open up all sorts of interesting possibilities from, you know, you have community wide events, which is historically what we've had to date. But now you can have like, like events just for my cohort or for my neighborhood or whatever you want to call it. So maybe that's just an event for, you know, bookkeeping only firms that are solo operators or tax only firms between a half million and a million, like these events can then get super, super specific. So everything that we just talked about, where you're doing this rapid fire and meeting different people and asking and seeing how their proposals work and how their 1099 process works and all these different things that's helpful to do generally with any firm owner, but it's even more helpful to do with firm owners who are just like you. So where we originally capped the community at 500 members, the rationale being if it gets too big, it becomes impersonal. I also wanted to create space for other people to do their own community things, which is like why we've seen a good number of new communities this fall where we initially like hit pause because of that. I've actually come around to the other, other end of the spectrum for a couple of reasons. One, I feel like we've solved the issue of the room being too big with that context because I actually think there's a version of a 5,000 person community that can feel more intimate than a 500 person community. When the people that you see and interact with every single day are contextually just like you. And that's an even better version of community. It's not to say that you can't learn from folks that run different firms than you. You for sure can. But I would say there's a lot more places for you to do that. You know, social media conferences, like we already have general places for us to Learn from firms who are not like our own. But to be able to make like very intimate spaces, small rooms that are hyper contextual, that is the best possible use of your time. And I think that solves for the issue we had originally been concerned about in the community of just growing too big and losing the specialness. So I think that helps. I'm also moving past this arbitrary cap, I think as I get better about maybe understanding and acknowledging my, my value in the profession. So one could argue that me launching the community in the first place has actually led to a bunch of other communities and a much broader awareness of communities in general and their value in the profession. Arguably I don't know that. And this is the stuff that's like hard for me to say out loud because you just, you sound like an a hole for saying it. I don't know there's anybody else in the industry that is putting thought leadership on blast to the level that I am right now. And I recognize as I do that I'm shifting perspectives of people and opening their minds to all sorts of things from new tech to maybe more thoughtful ways to run an accounting firm. But also the value of stuff like community, which was like the very most helpful thing to me in my firm running journey and the fact that like my community's still around and there's even more cropping up, like this is the most compelling proof that there can be that that stuff is extremely valuable. And if I hit pause or if I, you know, killed the community tomorrow, if I didn't keep building communities, I actually think that that would hurt the overall ecosystem of a, of communities in our space. I think because I have the loudest megaphone right now, it would be short sighted to say we've reached this level and this is all the further we're ever going to go, bro. I'm 36, I'm not even two years removed from running my firm and doing this stuff full time. Like, I think community is the future of so much. In many ways it's the future of the profession and how people learn. We're so disgruntled about like, you know, organizational bodies in the profession. It's like, I don't know what the future is for those things because they're like, they're struggling and especially folks my age are just don't feel like they're getting much from those governing bodies anymore. But it's like, it's not as if Right now in 2024 communities have reached their destination. Like, no, they're more like the future of everything than they are. Okay, Everybody that's in the world that you know would benefit from a community has found one. It's like, no. The vast majority of people are running their accounting firm from under a rock, and they stumble into a YouTube video and they're like, oh, wow. Somebody talks about what I do out here and it can be transformative for them. And I think as long as I'm able to enable that for people, which I hope is continues to happen for a long time, I would argue the most valuable thing that I can then do with all of those eyeballs and all those people coming together is to actually connect them with each other. Not just sit up on stage and say, everybody look at me and everybody learn from me. No, like, that's how it starts. Because I think people don't know anything else, like, anything besides that. But the greatest thing I can do for you is connect you to 30 other people that run firms just like you. And you'll never go to a live event again without a whole bunch of friends built in. You'll never be short for people to ask for advice. Like, that's. That's just. That is the way to run an accounting firm. And you can't convince me that it's not something that everybody needs. Okay, I'm done shilling for myself. My community, honestly, is intentionally hard to find because I only want people joining there that are, like, way deep in the content. Because, like, imagine if I start putting my community on billboards and stuff like that. You get a bunch of randos joining and you lose the specificity that makes it special. Right now, the people who join that are the ones who can go 30 minutes deep into a really nerdy episode like this. And that's what you want. Imagine rocking up to a room just full of those people. It's pretty darn cool. Like, that's where when you just create the room and you put those people into there, that's what makes it really, really special. And so if you get too promotional about it, it will absolutely ruin it. That's why this sort of thing is. It's uncomfortable for me, both because I don't want that community getting general, but also because I struggle with self promotion as much as I think we all do. Anyways, that's the story of my community. We've heard from a couple other really cool communities this week. We're going to hear from a few more next week. My goal, honestly, is just to give you better transparency into the options that are out there and to hopefully have you come out the other side feeling more convicted? That like, yes, like a community needs to be an essential part of every, every accounting firm sort of growth stack, like personal development. It was just so, so core for me. So thanks for coming and hanging today and letting me blather on. I'll see you in the next one.