377 A New Community For $1M+ Accounting Firms

It's your lucky day, buddy. We got Brandon, the Brandon hall talking with us today about a community that he just launched.

Four million plus dollar firm owners.

We talk about that a bit but.

It'S also just a bit of a Brandon brain dump which is always a hoot if you've ever caught talks we've done with Brandon on the pod in the past. One of the most like truly different progressive thinkers of like my generation of accountant. So always a fun guy to hang with. Buckle up. It's a good. Brandon. Thanks for being here. Always a pleasure. What's the 32nd Brandon hall intro? If anybody hasn't come upon you online.

Yet, the Brandon hall intro. So 2016, I launched my firm, went full time into it. I was working at EY Ernst and Young prior to that, but launched my firm because I just didn't understand why I had to go into the office, dress up, never see the client, track all my time, bill to the, you know, 10th of the hour, all that type of stuff. Figured that there, there was a better way to do it. So I wanted to run a remote firm, fully remote work anywhere in the world, service my clients as long as I had an Internet connection. And I wanted the niche in real estate mainly because I wanted to learn more about real estate investing myself. And, and so then I just kind of scaled a firm from there. So today we are going to do probably 12.2 or so million in revenue. We grow 40 to 50% per year, all organic from digital marketing. We have yet to do an M and A deal although that is up and coming as we want to, to kind of accelerate our growth. And yeah, we work with about, about a thousand clients across the United States. I've got a team, a US team, probably about 55. We're adding a lot more people here in about a week and then I've got an offshore team of about 40, 45 as well. So it's been a, it's been a rocket ship. It's been a lot of fun to scale this thing up bigger than I ever thought that it would ever be.

So a thousand clients on 12 million a year, that's a pretty solid like revenue per client.

Yeah, yeah. I think, you know, most of our clients probably come in around 12, 15k a year. But then we've got, we have a private equity group that works with pretty large clients where I think the average client there is like I don't know, 70k, 60, 70k, a tax work. The high end clients are probably 400k or so, 300 400k of tax work and then there's accounting work on top of it as well. So. So, yeah, so the larger, the larger client group really pulls that up for us.

We've had at least one other chat on the podcast before. I highly recommend checking it out. People like that one. Today we're talking community stuff because the world needed another accountant community, I guess. Brandon, why did so you launched Community this fall. Why did that need to exist and why were you the one to do it?

So I have always had a coach. Before I launched my firm, I hired a coach. And I've always been part of a community of entrepreneurs, whether it's inside the accounting space or outside the accounting space. So as I've scaled the firm, I've been a part of a few different accounting communities, realize included. And I've always had this coach. But what I saw, what I saw happen once I crossed, it wasn't like really $1 million. That's what I target in 415, the community that I'm running. But once I got to probably like three, four or five million dollars, I realized that a lot of the communities that I was a part of, I was giving a lot more value than I was extracting at that point. And don't get me wrong, like I love helping firm owners. However, there, there becomes a breaking point of like this just isn't worth my time anymore. So I kind of, I looked around. There are really no communities that cater to these seven figure firms that aren't like, you know, there's like those like Facebook ad communities and stuff that are out there that like, you know, it's just all about sales. And what I wanted to run was like more of a practice management type of, type of a look and feel. And that's what I needed help with at that level when I was 3, $4 million. I talk about this online. Like you reach a ceiling when you're at 3, 4 or 5 million. That if you can't staff your leadership team, you're toast. You're always going to be in the work. You're going to be working 70 hours a week, your team's going to burn out. You're always going to be recycling people because you can just never scale out of the work and focus on building the platform and the communities. Like the peer network in that space just doesn't really exist. It feels like sub probably 1 to $1.5 million in revenue. There's a lot of communities, there's a lot of peer networks. And then once you get above probably 15 million. The, the larger alliances like the Aprio alliance, the BDO alliance, those types of things, those start to come into play because you can get your team to access really top and elite tax talent from bdo, from Aprio and all these other large, large firms. But those are super expensive. They charge like 1% of revenues or something. So it's, it's not, it's not something like cheap. So I just looked at it as, there's this gap in the middle, which makes sense because I felt the gap because when I was in the middle, I went external, I went outside of the accounting world to join various entrepreneurship groups both locally and online to try to get that sort of peer network going. And I never really, never really felt like I landed. Uh, so my attempt here to build my community 4:15 is to cater to that sort of middle group. The one to probably 10 to 15 million dollars firm. That's where I want to be. That, that's the network that I want to build. And it's a lot of practice management, like a lot of the topics that we've been discussing so far are related to delegation and leadership, which is what I felt there too. You really have to, you know, if you want to take your firm from three to $10 million, you have to change as a leader. Um, you have to shed the skills that got you to three and you have to build an entirely new skill set. Uh, and nobody really tells you that until you smash up against that, that ceiling at 3, 4 million dollars and you feel it.

Is that something where sometimes the person to get it to 3 won't be the person to get it to 10. Like in software startups, they talk about kind of the zero to one people versus the scale people.

I would say in a software startup, probably because you're looking to go from three to 10 in one year. But I think that in the accounting firm world, I think that you can be the person that takes it to 10. If you got it to 3, I think you can take it to 10. I also believe that you, if you get it to 10, you can take it to 50 and you can take it to a hundred. As long as you have the ability to objectively self reflect on how you created issues and solved issues throughout the year in the firm. It's kind of like Tom Brady, the greatest of all time, in his 40s, still reviewing the game tape. Why would the greatest of all time quarterback review game tape tape? He's already the best, right? But that's the type of mindset that you really kind of need, I think, to, to continue scaling the firm. And if you can have that mindset, I do believe that you can take it, if you get it to 3, you could take it to 10, you could take it to 15, you could take it to a hundred. And I also believe that you have the timeline to do it. Like CPA firms, part of the growth equation is just time. I look at some of the larger firms that, you know, we want to be and I get antsy. I'm like, I want to be there tomorrow. And my COO reminds me, well, the one thing that they have is 30 years on us and it's like, okay, that makes sense. Like we're, we're, we're going to get there and we're really good. But you know, it takes time to compound a service business.

I suspect I do think they're like folks at this level. There's, I think, more of an appetite for executive coaching. And you're, you're maybe more used to working with outside help. But most people, I don't think I've experienced what quote unquote community looks like.

What were the good and the bad.

Of, you know, say a BDO type setup. As much as you've waited into that, like an industry thing like that and like Hamptons, like we talked, we've talked about that before, like a non industry membership group. Like what as you have experienced those, I guess what were the upsides and the downsides that this hopefully makes the most of?

Yeah, I think that the upsides of going outside of the industry is that you can get this sort of third party perspective that you don't get inside of the industry. I think that inside of the industry we start to do a lot of the same things and we start to, we stop questioning, like, what if we could do this a different way, what if we could do this better? Whereas an outsider, a third, a third party outsider is going to be able to leverage their experience building software or building something completely different like a manufacturing company. And being like, well, have you tried this type of approach? So that I think is very valuable. The downside to going outside of the industry is that it's harder to relate. You spend a lot more time on content, context. Some of the outsider communities that I've joined in the past, the ones that are very unhelpful is where is where. It's just, it takes a long time to explain to somebody why something will or will not work because they lack all that experience, all that context that you have. So there's pros and cons. I personally, I have a business coach that is an outsider but running a service business and that's been helpful. But I think that from a community perspective, my approach going forward is going to be more of the insider community. I've spent enough time on the outside with the outside communities to kind of see that value from a community perspective. And so if I want the outside perspective from here on out, I think I'm just going to hire outside advisors to, to come and learn the context that I would otherwise have to spend a lot of time explaining.

Have you kicked around much in like the bdos or lineals, like those bigger groups?

So I have not joined any of those groups. I have been on multiple calls with the reps that run those groups. They each have different strengths. I think they all focus on, they all stay, they focus on leadership development. My understanding, it's a little more passive in terms of like, you know, here's a library of content and it's up to you to, to kind of click through it and leverage it. And there's nothing wrong with that approach. It seems like, and I could be wrong, but it seems like from the various calls that I've had that the alliances are focused on providing you a national tax office as like a, as a, as a resource so as a service. So it's like if you have the BDO National Tax Office, that's 50 people or something, they're tax geniuses. You can tell your clients, I can do everything because I have specialty tax services through bdo, this alliance that I'm a part of and that that's pretty valuable in the sense that you can build back that time and, and retain the client. So I think it just depends on what type of, what level of client you're serving and what your capabilities are and whether or not something like that makes sense. But it seems like that's what those alliances are kind of geared around and maybe they're trying to get away from that. That's what I can't really figure out is like they say that they do a lot of things, but then they all point back to the national tax office as a service. So again, if you're, if you're part of the alliance, you're listening to this and you're telling me I'm wrong. I would love to understand what else they do because that's been my understanding so far.

This episode is sponsored in part by Corvi. 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 in 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 you.

To learn more about Corby, check out.

The link down in the show Notes.

This episode is sponsored in part by Cloud accountant staffing, who helps accounting firms work with talented accountants in the Philippines.

For the first time.

Origin Story of Cloud Account 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 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. A light bulb went off and cloud account staffing was born. Now he's just 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 this.

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. If you're feeling blocked on hiring heading into next year, give me a shout. Cloud Account Staffing Link down in the show Notes.

I've gotten a peek into a bit of it because I've done talks for a number of them and everyone seems a little different. Like more. More does a bunch of like networking stuff with firms globally to enable more global client service and collab on international stuff. And they each seem to have their own little bent to them. Some of them also. It's like a lead engine even. They'll pass leads off to firms like of all of all these flavors and I don't even know what they call them, probably membership organizations. But what aspects of that are most appealing to you is your community. Ultimately this is where people come to get thought leadership from Brandon. Is it just to connect folks, to learn from each other? What are you leading with?

Yeah, it's a little bit of both. I mean obviously I'm a big part of it and will continue to be a big part of it, but what I'm trying to do is pull together firm owners that are in that one to $15 million range and have them meet with each other, have them connect with each other and then share ideas as well. And honestly, like I launched this what, a month, two months ago. I've already learned a lot just from like the different ideas that people have floated around. The conversations have been much more strategic than any community that I've been in in the past as well. It's hard to describe what that means, but it's just a different, just a different vibe. But yeah, so it's, it's just a, so there's some peer networking, there's some of me, we're going to be running, getting some data going at the end of this year. So you know, like there's the, there's the Rosenberg survey, there's the IPA survey, but again there's like not really anything for this group. So that's something that we're going to do internally. Start benchmarking against each other going forward. Yeah, it's just a, it's a way for managing partners and they're like right hand person to get some practice management advice and consulting not only from me, but also from other people that are going through the same thing that they're going through. And I mean it's, it's so interesting because they all have the same problem. Like the $1 to $3 million is delegation, the $3 to $6 million is leadership. That's it. Those are the main problems to solve. And you see that theme in almost every thread of conversation going on between those firms.

What, like from a very practical standpoint, what is what does programming look like? Is that like you leading sessions? Is that you cutting them loose in small groups? What is that?

So right now it's a monthly live Q and A from me and a monthly masterclass and we've got two, two or three masterclasses in December. So we actually, actually ended up stacking them up a little bit. Um, but I, it's. I run some of our masterclasses and then I bring in some of my team and then I'm also going to be bringing in some of my coaches and people in the industry, but we run that on a monthly basis. So that's just firm, wide. Uh, and then what I do is I put them all into groups that meet on a monthly basis in a small group feel. So I facilitate that session and we kind of just work through some of their top problems is pretty much what the focus of the meeting is. That's kind of what it looks like practically. And then we've got Circle, which is just an online platform to ask questions, get answers, meet people, that type of thing. I want to next year run an in person event and part of the reason I'm keeping the community small, at least initially, is to be able to facilitate something like that without having to go out and like book a massive hotel and figure out those economics. So. So that'll be cool. I'm going to do that sometime next year. Probably about this time next year.

That sounds so cool. Can I come?

Sure, yeah. You're. You're invited. Absolutely.

Dude, in person events are, are like so spooky to me. Like, is our in person events hard for you or do you do those for your firm already or.

So we do them for our firm. Yeah, I think, I think part of a strong community and if I move away from 415 for a second, what I try to do at my firm is create community. Because if people build relationships and they feel like they're a part of something, they're not, they're less likely to want to leave that community. So yeah, so we do in person events. We only do one a year, but next year, next year we've got a lot. So we're really ramping it up. We're going to invest like $300,000 into getting people together next year in person. Part of one of those trips is the team event, but we're going to do a bunch of smaller events. So that should be really cool. But I like the in person events. It's fun meeting people and talking to people. I just came back from winning ways In Chicago, it's run by Gary Shammas. It's like all the top 75 or 100 firms. I don't deserve to be there, other than the fact that he likes me to go out and talk about digital marketing and how I run remote teams and stuff. But it's cool being in that room because you talk to people that are 10 times ahead of you, and it's just fun building those connections.

Yeah. Nothing beats in person for me. We were talking about this before we hit record. Is it Hampton? Is it Hampton or Hamptons?

Hampton. Hampton.

So it's a. It's a. Not specific to accounting community, but they're ti. They're talking about a pivot to more in person meetups. Because just like, a lot of people are like, I don't need another Zoom meeting.

Have you struggled with that?

Like, that? I think that's a real blocker for communities is. There's a lot to offer, but getting people to actually show up and engage and not be on email and, like, actually just turn their brain on for another meeting is hard.

Oh, that's definitely hard. Yeah. I mean, we experience that in our firm all the time. It's zoom fatigue, I think, is what we always talk about back during COVID Yeah, it's a real. It's a real thing. I think it's just hard to stare at. I mean, when you're on Zoom, do you just stare at yourself or what? Like, what do you do? Right. It's just hard to keep looking at one. Like, right now, I'm looking at a tab on my computer. I'm not looking at you or me, and I'm looking at this tab because it's right below my camera. And so.

Oh, my gosh.

Seriously, I'm not looking anywhere near my camera. I appreciate that dedication. You're not looking anywhere over there.

Wait, do you have, like, a teleprompter thing going on right now, or do you.

No, you're. You're just on my webcam, on my laptop, on my crappy AirPods. The people watching or listening to the podcast, they've got the whole setup. You don't. But you got it. You don't get that. That's why you can hear my kids screaming on the other side of the wall, but they won't be able to.

Yeah, well, anyway, that's exhausting. So. Yeah, I get it. I get it.

Feel free to look at yourself. Don't look at the tab.

I spend too much time looking at myself.

It's fine.

Yeah, but. But no, it is a. It is hard to X out the distractions. And yeah, it's absolutely a factor. If I could do in person all the time, I would. But I think that also comes with its own set of complexities as well.

Kids and getting out and away. And I think the guilty party is more just a lot of the low value meetings that you get sucked into unnecessarily. Like oftentimes I will hear the counter argument to something that is very valuable. But on zoom, the counter argument is, man, I'm already on enough zooms when the better question to ask is is this more valuable than the zooms that I'm on? Like what, what can I eliminate? Because almost certainly this is a bigger brain conversation you could be having than the other stuff you're getting sucked into.

Yeah, I think the timing of the, of scheduling those bigger brain conversations is important too. I did not do it this first go around with my 4:15 community. But my, my firm, I have all the, the bigger thinking conversations early in the morning. It's just, you're fresh, you can engage, you can get locked in. You try to do a let's brainstorm how to service our private equity level clients type of conversation at 4pm there's zero chance that that's going to be productive.

Is it like that much of a cliff for you? What is the threshold beyond which like you're any use in the afternoon?

Well, I think it's, it's pretty much anything past noon I'm toast.

Wow.

So yeah, I mean I crank in the morning and then anything past noon I'm pretty much toast.

But no wonder you don't like timesheets.

Big old zero past noon. But what I do, what I do after noon, after 1pm is typically when I'm feeling it. I will make sure that I have my calendar full of meetings that don't require me doing the big thinking. So I'll do like one on ones for example. Because on one on ones, effectively what you're trying to do is just be a guide to ask a bunch of questions and help them come to their own conclusions. So for me I just have to have a slate of questions which, you know, if you do this a thousand times, it's just natural. It's like a second habit at this point. So I can, I can have those conversations. It might, might be hard for some people, but for me those are easy conversations. So I schedule those in the afternoon. But like this morning we had that private equity brainstorming session at 9am this is the very first thing that I did and very first thing that everybody on that call did and we all came ready to rock and roll talking about how we're going to sell advisory services to large clients. What do they need and how do we meet those needs. And I can't have that conversation at 4pm no chance.

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 a Team up just this last week firm in Georgia looking for a senior accountant. The turn of the team up. Team up then deploys their recruitments in the 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 like I ever made any tax hires. I hired a bunch of folks from 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. This episode is brought to you in part by the fine folks at Live Flow. I am a unapologetic lover of notion. In fact, my whole like personal and business life runs on notion now. And the reason I like it is it's just like a very open ended tool for like doing data and database stuff. But also narrative things like writing. If you're a notion nerd, you get it. Live Flows New financial dashboards are the closest thing I have seen to finance notion in terms of. I can build like open ended narrative docs that I sent to my clients with all the words and explainers that I want to include but embedded with very real financial Data from their QuickBooks or their Xero file. And I can publish these reports either as snapshots that are static and never change or even publish like continuously updating reports that are pulling in live data from the ledger. So as long as the accounting file is up to date, it continues syncing that stuff in. If that's a, you know, a dashboard the client looks at on their phone every morning or report they check in on every week. Super flexible reporting platform form.

Not like this, sort of pretty templatized.

Here are the 12 different types of reports you can present. It's totally open ended. You can connect it back to anything in the accounting ledger. But because it's Live Flow, they also give you a bunch of templates if you don't want to have to build it from scratch. Gives you a much easier way to get started. And that's why I like Live flow. Learn more Check out the link down in the show notes.

Okay, two more questions I want to ask you that have nothing to do with community. What is your relationship to PE and thoughts on pe specifically in our space as you're getting bigger and I just, you just, you built a new house and then you got, I'm sure you got a mortgage and you're getting pretty old so you're probably thinking exit already. Have they turned you yet?

What's my relationship with pe? I love, I love the PE guys. I love listening to them because they are thinking way bigger than anybody else that I know is thinking. And, and so I love my executive team's like, all right, you need to chill out on the PE conversation. You're stressing this out. But man, I love talking to those folks. They just, it's amazing like the growth that they believe that they can drive and, and just hearing the different business models and how they leverage capital. Will I sell to PE? Unlikely. I, I've got a 10 year vision that I want to execute and I think that we can do it and I think that we can become something very big. I, I think we've already done some cool stuff but you know, I, I think that we can impact a lot larger piece of the industry by continuing, continuing on our growth path. And I think that I can give our employees, our team members just a lot more opportunity than they would have ever had anywhere else, including pe. So that's kind of the goal. But yeah, I'm kind of like I'm agnostic to it. I mean it's part, it's part of the game and, and I love talking to them because they definitely expand your mindset. But you know, I'm not, not really interested in going that route.

Did you see when Rebecca Driscoll posted online recently that she was selling her cloud accounting practice? Did you follow?

I think I did see that on X. Or like she already sold her something. I think I saw something like that. Yeah.

She, she posted on X one day. I'm selling my cloud accounting practice. And she also posted on like, she posted realize too. It's got over 100 otherwise. There's kind of an interesting thing happening right now where there is this notion of like creator businesses, like online personalities. And what all of them are trying to do is run legitimate businesses alongside creating content. And then you have people that run legitimate businesses that get really good at.

Content and there's like this element of celebrity probably isn't the right word, but.

Like there's a very real that like it's, you have access to deals that other people wouldn't have access to. Like, it's like it will genuinely in the end open up way more possibilities. Does that impact like the strategy of the overall firm? Like is like, do you, I mean you've got an executive team and all that. You're not hustling QuickBooks. It is like, do you actually have those conversations to say like, there's value in this association with Brandon's identity and Brandon being visible.

Can you elaborate on that a little bit? What, what's the question?

The opportunities that like that association with you ultimately unlocks, like the folks who are into Brandon and maybe they're acquiring firms or something like that. Like I remember when I rolled out my placement like my hiring thing at one point and I mentioned I was like, do you need to hire anybody? And you're like, no accounting firm? No. Cool. It was such a Brandon response. No progressive accounting firm needs this because.

They'Re visible on social media and they.

Got plenty of people to come work for them. I'm like, that is such a brand and advantage that you have that maybe you're not even aware of.

Yeah.

But like, do you think about like these advantages that are specific to your firm?

So. I do, yeah. I think part of our 10 year plan is we want to, to expand into other niches and expand into other service offerings. I'm kind of looking at this as building a platform with tax and accounting being a part of that platform. So the question sort of becomes if Brandon can continue being a thought leader in the industry and pulling industry people together from pe, from vendors, from other firm owners, from, from potential talent, that's going to unlock just a lot of opportunities. And then, and then it's just a matter of, of cycling through and evaluating those opportunities and of those opportunities. But yeah, I mean, we, we have those conversations relatively frequently internally with my leadership team, just about what is coming down the pipeline or what potentially could be coming down the pipeline. So, yeah, I think what you're asking is like, is it worth posting online? Maybe circling back to Rebecca's getting 100 Lois, which is incredible. There's absolutely value to it. I think the hard piece for a lot of the influencer people is if you, you could be really good at creating content, right? And you could, you could build a firm to a million, $2 million creating content and being that sort of sole, sole driver of revenue. But just because you can create content doesn't mean that you can lead a team. And a lot of people really struggle with that. They really struggle to understand how to develop people, how to develop leaders that can be resilient and make their own decisions without you. That is what holds everybody back. So a lot of the content people struggle to make that transition, and then they get stuck at this kind of like two, $3 million mark, and they make great money. I mean, they, they crush it. But they sit there and they're like, okay, how do I grow the enterprise value? At a certain point, you don't need the cash flow. This is what they all run into. At a certain point, you don't need the cash flow. It's fun to talk about. It's fun to dunk on people, if that's your style, right? Some of them do that. But at a certain point, you don't need the cash flow. What you really need is enterprise value. So if you can, if you can get $2 million of cash flow, or if you can get $2 million enterprise value, what is more efficient? Probably $2 million of enterprise value, because you're not paying taxes on it today. And once they realize that, then they really struggle to make that switch. If they can't figure out how to lead teams. That's what I see with, with, with some of these folks. And the other thing, too, is that if you can't lead Teams and you can't develop people to run the business without you, then what you really have is a high paying job and you really need to be able to develop the system so that it's attractive for somebody else to pay for it and to buy it from you at some later point. And the more system, the more systematic you can make it, the higher the premium you're going to drive.

Does that identity that that creator need to be both? Like in an alternate timeline where you've got a really good operator that you work with, like, does that person really need to wear all the hats?

No, no, not at all. I think that ego plays a big role. I am for whatever reason, built in a way where I can self reflect objectively on how I've positively or negatively impacted whatever happens and I can improve on myself. I think a lot of operators would be better paired up. They would make a lot more money and drive a lot more impact if they were paired up with the influencer creator type people. And I think a lot of the creator type people would make a lot more money and drive a lot more impact if they would pair up with operator people. And you know, it's funny, I've had conversations with a couple of the influencer people. I'm like, hey, like, why don't you come influence with me? And just like, you know, the premium is just way too high to make any business sense. But in the, in the end it's like, yeah, but 10 years from now your stake in the firm could be $15 million, right? And it's so there's this, there's this kind of, I don't know, there's a, there's the, there's this balance that's hard to, hard to navigate.

Okay, last question I wanted to ask you. What does you came out with like bit between your teeth. I'm going to take down Big four show a better way of building this stuff. What does a better version of pick a number of a $50 million firm look like? What's a fundamentally cooler version of that? Because there's got to be more to it than just you don't have to do a spreadsheet or a timesheet.

Yeah, I think it's so, I think what we've done so far is we've proven that you can run a remote firm at some level of scale. Now I had somebody mention to me one time that I'm still not at scale. So I was like, what is scale? They said $100 million. Like, okay, I'll come back to this when I'm at $100 million. But I think that we've shown that you can run remote teams in mass at scale, and you can. You can grow organically and control the growth and continue that organic growth at scale as well. So I think from, like, showing a different way to do it, hopefully, hopefully people feel like we've shown that. I think that we feel like we've shown that. So my. My original mission was just like that. I want to change the accounting industry by running a remote firm and by growing with digital marketing, by. By being able to run remote teams, effectively build the culture, build the community. And I feel like we've done that. So to answer your question, the question is like, so what else is there? What is what's next? And I don't know that we would necessarily change a whole lot of what we do today, except for the fact that we're investing a lot more into learning and development going starting in 2025. So this year is our first year with a VP of talent. A new partner of mine, Kaelin, she's phenomenal. And next year I've pretty much got, like, just released her into let's build this learning and development out and let's really rock and roll. So we've been kind of triangulating with a lot of larger firms as to what that looks like. And the goal is to really create this firm that not only has everything that we have today, but is a great place to work, the best place to build technical skills. And really just this aspect of, like, how do you make tax and accounting, which people love to complain about, and the repetitiveness of it is inherently boring. How do you make that fun? Like, how can you make that. How can you make tax and accounting something that people enjoy coming to work and being part of? And so that's, I think, the next pillar for us. So I don't think it's like anything, anything different from what we're doing today, other than just spending a little bit more focus and effort on making sure that our people are the best professionals, that they have the best technical skills, that they have the best opportunities to grow their careers, and they're enjoying it along the way. And we're not there yet. We've got a lot of work to do along those lines, but I think that's the goal.

Very cool. Okay, we're going to plug the community down in the show notes for sure. What else should we plug? Your newsletter?

Yeah. Newsletter. Yeah, I write a newsletter every Sunday. I might go back to Saturdays I don't know, just testing Sunday versus Saturday. But newsletter is great. I talk about practice management, different things going on in the industry, my my thoughts and perspective. If you're on my newsletter, you're welcome to email me with questions. I help people from time to time as often as I can.

Cool.

Thank you for doing this.

Brandon.

Thanks Jason.