378 The Story Behind The ORIGINAL Accountant Community

Today, the one and only Jason Blummer. In my eyes, kind of the community OG. He's been running Thrival for 15 years. This was a fun conversation with him just picking his brain on. Like, what did you learn over 15 years of community running? What are your views on community now? Who it's good for? Like, the. The strategy for firm owners. Should I. Is this a thing I got to engage with, like, every week? Once a month? I go to conferences every year. Like, what's the best. The best way to balance the fact that I got a job? What, with, like, learning from other people who run firms as well? He had some pretty really good wisdom on that stuff. So without further ado, here's Jason. Hope you like it. Let's do it. Jason, if there's anybody listening to this who has not bumped into you in the wild, what's. What's like the 32nd intro of. Of what they should know about you.

Been running, been in our profession for about 30 years. A CPA running a firm my dad started a little bit. It's over 25 years. I've been running it 22 years. Something like that. And Thrival, our community, is about 15 years old. And that's it.

That's it.

That's it.

You got a bunch of kids out.

Of the house, right, Right. Yeah. I'm a newly empty nester, so my third daughter. I have three daughters. My third daughter just went to university.

Well, if you ever want three, you could swap in, even just for a weekend, let me know.

Okay. No, I'm good. I'm like. I'm liking the empty nest thing. This is kind of. Kind of cool.

So this week on the pod, we're talking community stuff. And as far as I'm concerned, I'm sure there's always been a million versions of community back to, I don't know, Roman times.

Sure.

At the baths or something. When I was launching mine, like you, you were kind of the only one I had on my radar. And so I'm curious because a lot of folks look at my community and they're like, wow, what a novel idea. Where'd you come up with that? And I'm like, well, I just stole it from somebody else. Like, like we've always done like I did. Right? Yeah. So I'm curious, like, what was the advent of yours? Why did that need to be a thing? And why were you, you know, the right person to will that into existence?

Yeah, well, I. I may have started it similar to you. I was running a firm and, like, Go, wow, I don't know what I'm doing. So yeah, you start bumping into people. I think we got in. I think I was on Twitter in 2009 and was. Was just meeting some CPAs on Twitter. There were like four or five CPAs. And I'm like, can I call you? Because there's something I can't figure out about this online cloud payroll thing that we're all doing now. So just started, you know, meeting people online and then we went to some conferences together. It was like a handful of people. And then I'm like, I think I need to be with them more formally. And so I launched a community 15 years ago. I had no idea what that was. I knew Paul Dunn, if you've heard his name is a co author of Ron Baker. He started Results Accountants network in Australia 30ish years ago. So they had something similar, but it was a training program for accountants teaching them to run businesses. And Paul Dunn's not an accountant, so he was teaching them how to do that. And so he, he had some, some things that came like ran. One was a very old community that came into the the US and some other older ones. And some of those founders are in their 70s and 80s now. And I had started hearing about them through Ron Baker. So I think I had a sense that communities could be a thing. So really it would though it was to. It was free. I didn't know. I just like, can we all just hang out together? I didn't know that you put money on these things that didn't work out. Later when I went, I think I need to have a price on this. People like, that's not cool. And I'm like, yeah, I didn't realize that when I did this. So. So it just started on the, you know, a LinkedIn group board and it was really just to go, let's talk about what we're doing and figuring this out together. That's why we have communities. Like, we are way better together than by ourself. There's. We do not need to be alone.

Good grief, that's so funny. And my community started from Twitter, from making friends on Twitter and then from going to some conferences.

Yeah.

And like you hear that thing of you need to go to a conference or two a year because the experience you get talking with other people, I get. So it's so transformational. And I came away from conferences and I'm like, man, I need this like shot into my veins every week, all the time.

Yeah, yeah, that's right. All the Time.

That's funny. That's like exactly how mine started.

That is a trip. Well, you start to meet people and I guess you start to go, I want to be with them more often. I actually probably need to be with them more often because in those early stages of running a firm, man, you are screwing up stuff so fast. Yeah. And if you're pretty creative. I was pretty creative. Always trying new thing, not scared to ever try new things. So broke a lot of stuff.

What is your. This is a total tangent.

Yeah.

What is your, how is your relationship to like your appetite for trying new things evolved? Do you still break things? Like, are you still trying to reinvent the wheel? Constantly.

That has changed. That has changed a lot. So, yeah. Risk taking, we say in some of our programs, is a skill. It is a skill you learn so early on you just try a bunch of stuff. But as you, as you get a lot of experience, your gut gets better, which is really just what your experience is. And you take risks in different ways. And so if your firm's more complicated, you have bigger team, your family's growing, whatever, your appetite for risk changes because things are more complicated. So you can't, you run less on gut and you have to run more on data. And you just have to figure out when that time changes. And so you do change how you take risks. But we do teach. You have to take risks as an entrepreneur. You don't have a choice to break into new markets, to test pricing, to try new, you know, automations and software. So you don't have a choice to, to take risks. But you do get better at it. And so I don't do stupid things. I plan more and do things that seem scary, but they have a lot of planning behind them so that there's more opportunity for them to work out. Because that's the goal. You want it to work out.

Yeah, I feel like, I feel like my risk taking has gotten maybe, maybe narrower. And I think we have probably been exposed to an above average volume of seeing other people try things and.

Yeah, that makes sense.

I suspect we might have. And this is this, I mean, this is kind of one of the biggest upsides of community, I think, is I. You. It's almost you develop a better gut.

Yeah.

You have a more refined gut that's seen, that's been through more things that maybe focuses that risk taking a little better.

You do? Yeah. Well, it's like, yeah. I mean, when you were first a parent, it's like, wow, those poor children, they, they survived their first few years and then, you know, later on you kind of know what you're doing with the third one. You ignore them a little bit more than the first one. I don't know. So it's just experience. Experience lets you know things better. But what you're supposed to do as an entrepreneur is once you learn things, move past that and expand and try new things. So you're always kind of moving into places where you're not sure what you're doing. And I think that's one thing that's valuable in a community. Because we tell people in our community, make sure you're never copying anybody because somebody is always in a place that they've never been before. And so there. So you look, you always look at somebody and go, they have it figured out. Which is really weird leading a community. Because people go, well, how did Jason or Julie do it? We're like, do not copy us in this area. We are failing big time. So. But there's just funky perception. There's a real weird perception leading a community. But we have the same problems running our firm that every community member has. That's just weird.

So go. Going back to kind of community 101. And a lot of the questions people asked me in the beginning that I'm sure they asked you as well, and it's probably the biggest question for folks that haven't explored community yet, is just the fundamental question, why does this need to exist? Because there is a Twitter and There is a LinkedIn and there are conferences like why? Why does that need a separate home from where you already hang out?

Yeah, that's a great question. I think communities have a leader that protects some of the values of why it exists. So for example, if you join ours, you sign an NDA confidentiality and we're going to enforce that. So some people may have different types of conversations there in a community that they won't have in a public community. Because a Twitter is like a community too. And of course we know tax Twitter and there's a lot of major benefit in those kind of communities. But when you get into a private one where you start to pay, you're paying for something in return, which is a little bit more protection. It's probably a little narrowing into a group of people that are more like minded, like you. So a tax Twitter is a broader community which is good for broad topics, but what we focus on is really expanding firms around the 1 to 10 million. So they're hitting some super complicated levels of growth and you need a little bit more narrowed Mindset of people that are doing the same exact thing and running into the same wall. So you can pick their brain. And so if a community can form that, that ecosystem of those types of like minded people, it becomes more valuable. So there, there are reasons like, well, it's technology. You know, you can get some of what you need from some of your content. But, but boy, if you go into the community, into the realize community, the you get the depth of how you're cared for, then you know that community starts to provide other people to kind of guide you through some of those questions more directly. You don't get those in broader online communities. There's nobody serving you in a community. There's people set up to kind of provide services, so to speak, kind of like any business. So I don't know.

Yeah, interesting, interesting on that one. That's something that is kind of a tricky thing to navigate as a community runner and as, as the one that's kind of protecting that space is, do you ultimately, I'm curious your take on this. Do you ultimately let vendors into that? Like is there any overlap there? Or do you have to keep that sacred?

Yeah, we keep, we keep them out. Yeah, it's, yeah. And people who run communities know there's a balance between the vendor and sponsor relationship and your member community relationship. So it's a lot of the hard lines you take. For us, we'll never let a vendor or a sponsor inside of our community. That's not their space, it's not for them. That means some sponsors don't want to align with you. And you have, you know, you have to say that's okay or sometimes people will give them what they want. But I think there's a lot of, you know this and you do this. There's a lot of authenticity to the community that you create. But it's not that. It is for the firm owners. That's the only people it's for. And so, but we, we, we really find we do partner with sponsors because we really do need them for our conference. They really do make the economics of a conference possible. Because you don't get rich building conferences. If, if nobody knew that we've been running ours for, you know, 14 years. And you don't just get rich running a conference. So you have this, you have this whole sponsor side that funds some of that so you can provide that community service. So no, we want to keep that real, real separate as much as we can.

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Yeah, that's. Yeah, that does. That did develop so that it's weird. I think a lot. The community drives a lot, or did drive a lot of the change. Early on that had to stop where we had to take and drive the value that we know they needed. But early on they were like, wow, this is amazing. We're together. They'd never been in a community. Can, can we meet to meet up somewhere? And we see that even in the broader communities they do meet up. Right? Because that's, that's, that's just where we all go. We're in this online virtual community. Can we be together in person? Because that's just so valuable. And so I think it was early on they said, let's all, let's all meet together. And I said, okay, we'll do it. So I asked Ron Baker and Ed Kless to come speak, I guess, 14 years ago at our first steeper weekend. And that's like, I need 30 people. I'll split their fee by 30. And y' all are going to have to. Well, there's rent and some, you know, some barbecue, so if y' all will pay for it. And they said, we'll do it. And I'm like, it's $500. They're like, we're in. I'm like, okay, you better pay me, because if I get stuck with a Barbecue bill, I'm screwed. I cannot afford it. So. So it just became that. And then you do it again and then you, you know, it becomes a bigger thing. And then you. And then you start marketing it differently. That stuff just grows. You figure that out as it goes. And it. There was a point probably four or five years ago, it switched a little bit, where it was probably 60, 70% of the attendees were community members. And now it's about 50. 50.

Okay.

Where just the profession comes from, really from all over the world now. There are people that just always come from different parts of the world, mostly the US and Canada, and then about 50% are in the community. So, yeah, that, that. Those kind of things change over time, which is interesting to see.

And you call it Deeper, Deeper Weekend, which kind of a, a, a loaded, Loaded phrasing. What's, what's the kind of. The significance behind that?

Yeah, Well, I think the first one was on a weekend and then it's never been on a weekend before. So that's a big old fat joke.

So. Wait a minute. So it's literally. I thought it was like a, like this, woo, woo. Like, hey, we're gonna kumbaya. Like that kind of deeper. It's just because it went past the weekend.

Yeah, it's during the week, so that's incredible. Yeah, it's, it's, it's a big fat funny joke. And then eventually people just ignore that. It's never, it's never been on a weekend. So. But it's.

I honest to goodness thought it was like a, like a heartfelt kind of. No, it's just barbecue during the week.

Yeah, it's barbecue during the week. Yeah. So no, it's. I think we named it Deeper Weekend a long, long time ago. And we, what we did is we picked a topic, we went deep into that. So we still do that. We have a theme. And though there's not tracks or anything like that, we don't really have sponsor speakers. So that's kind of a thing we don't do. Though we do give them a little interview, you know, part for the stage as part of their sponsorship, but we don't have speakers that are sponsors. We don't break a community up. So we have to have a venue where we get everybody in the room and they stay in the room together, because then we carve out an hour, an hour and a half each day for them to break up and talk together. Because some of them, that's why they're really there. It's not just for Speaking they're for each other and that's what they actually need is to hear other people going through what they're going through. So I think the deeper comes from picking a theme and going just real deep into that. So there might be five to six sessions, teaching sessions of an hour each and it's really two full days and then like three dinners or parties at night. And so it's, yeah, it's, it's a lot to run but you know, we kind of have to spin up an events team and my partner Julie knows how to do all that. And so yeah, it's pretty valuable. And so we're, and we just do a lot of surveys around what do they think is valuable. So you know, we're always trying to change it and tweak it to make it more valuable for them to learn and grow and be challenged and feel supported.

Yeah, the, the excitement of being able to connect with the folks, especially the community folks that you've been hanging out with online all year, to be able to do that in person, like that's a really, like you almost run the risk of getting in the way totally. The fact that they just want to be together. And I think there's to some degree there's some similar frustrations with just the way most conference programming is these days, where a lot of people are like, I kind of just want to hang with my peeps and like, what can we do to enable connection? Like, do you, what have you stumbled into programming wise that maybe other conferences could borrow from?

Yeah, I mean we don't have that buttoned up perfectly, but that's something I think we'll probably always struggle with because there's going to be a mix of people going, if I'm paying to come, you have to teach me. And they're never going to tell you how much. So you have to kind of figure out, well, I'm going to give you four sessions. And some might say that's not enough teaching. And then sometimes like this past year, we ended early. We used to go till like a 9 o', clock, but we ended it early and people left and went to dinner. Downtown Greenville, South Carolina, where we hold it, which is a really kitschy, small, really up and coming city with a great safe downtown and a park and you know, rivers running through it, those kind of things. So they, we, we find they really enjoyed that and they do. They, you know, we, we do that at conferences. You go find people and you go to dinner and man, that is where, that is where stuff happens. Outside of your conference at a restaurant somewhere. So. So we actually intentionally made space for that where we hadn't done it before. And maybe it's because I'm old, it just got earlier. Maybe it'll be. We'll meet at a cafeteria at 4:30 one night for green beans or something. A macaroni and because I got to go to bed, I got to go to. Yeah.

9, 9pm as that's incredible that you would get accountants out to engage with something until 9pm yeah, well we moved.

It up and people said like that. Glad you moved it up. So. So we cut it off at 8 and we said leave the venue, we're closing it down.

So in person stuff is gold. Totally to, to bring this full circle to kind of the origination of the community itself where it's like I, I need this, I need this in a shorter feedback loop. This can't be a once or twice a year thing. What is, what do you think today in an era where we have an abundance of places to hang out from social media to communities and all of that. If you are advising say a 30 year old person who just started their own firm, I think we would probably both say like as part of your personal growth stack, there needs to be some sort of feedback loop there of how am I learning from other firm owners? How do you think people should approach that? Is that something where once a month they're carving out time? Is that something where every single week they're sitting with other firm owners? How would you balance that?

Well, we like to tell our thrival members, you know, because like y', all, we, we use a platform, I think circle. Maybe y' all use circle. We use circle platform. So it's something you can, you can go into. And we say they, they're providing a lot of their own support by going in there and being with people. We would like them to be in there weekly and, and we try to tell them a community commitment does take something from you. You're meant to get something from it but you are meant to like, you know, but you're always going to get the lurkers who kind of read some that respond. Then you get the four people that won't stop making posts. It's just how that, that's how those things work. You kind of know those people by name and you kind of, you want a mix of all of that. And so we think weekly that that's kind of the right interaction. But you know what, we also think that's a lot to ask People, you know, so. So we say if you're joining a community, it's kind of a serious commitment. It really can change you and help you grow. So hopefully you'll commit some of your calendar to it. And some people can and some can't. For the. For true, there. There are reasons why they can't all give that much time, but we want them to get the most out of it. We really do. You know, the.

I think, you know, zoom, zoom fatigue. We heard all about that during COVID because that was kind of the only way that we had to interact with people. But I think we. I still hear that a lot. As folks will say, I don't need another virtual meeting commitment. And like, my head goes to. Maybe the better question to ask is, you know, how do I look at all of my commitments and. And chop the least valuable ones? Because it is. It is so hard to just get people to show up and not be responding to emails and actually be engaged with a thing.

Yeah.

Do you struggle with that? Like what? Like, how do you navigate that in 2024?

Probably the same way you do. There's a lot we do in our community, which means there's a lot we're asking them to sign up for. And I don't know, I think maybe we have the view. Sometimes we're like, you know, we want you to have a lot of options to grow your firm, and sometimes I don't know what percentage they actually leverage of all of that stuff, which means for the community owner, what should I take away that stops distracting them from the things they should go to? Super hard to know. Nobody knows that. So what's helped us is we have three levels, right? There's different things you can participate in in three different levels. And it's, you know, ones for the larger firms that are. That are expanding and growing, creating complexity, and so they may need more education. A lot of times we find they, you know, at 2,3 million in revenue, they have a team, a leadership team. Hopefully they're out of a lot of the technical things, so they can commit to a lot of what our community is about, which is entrepreneurship, really. And so then they can have time to commit to more sophisticated programming and teaching. Whereas the. The lower options of community, there's not as much to do, but they may not want as much or they may not need as much, and they can choose a different price point to kind of move into different ones. So what?

From a practical standpoint, so there's. There's different levels, but for the, for the Average community go or like, what does that look like? There's a, there's a platform, obviously you can engage with and, you know, chat with folks and stuff like that. But by and large, is that something where folks are turning up on a zoom a couple of times a month? Like, what does the normal routine look like?

Yeah. And a lot of communities may do this similarly. I don't know. But you, you join, you have access to the pri. Everybody goes into the private space. And then we assign people to smaller groups, 10, you know, 10 to 15, we call those community groups. And they meet on a recurring date every month. So they're. And that's bringing them together. So, you know, the community is typing back and forth. The community group is virtual, but still on zoom, but seeing faces back and forth. And then a couple of the levels get masterclasses, which are entrepreneurial, you know, quarterly webinars that we build that are technically about how to construct and design firms, you know, from all kinds of things niching, you know, hiring, all the things that we as firm owners go through. So a lot of them get that and then some in the higher levels, they do get more in person stuff, they pay more. So. But then you're saying, you're always thinking, okay, they're going to love it because they really are in a narrow group, right? They're going to be like 30 or 40 people at their firm size going through some kind of education that is really about what they need at their size. But then as a community owner, you're like, well, they're coming from California to the east Coast. They may, they may need to choose that and not choose deeper weekend. And so you have to, in our minds, we have to start thinking what's right for us to offer. That's not too much. But higher levels expect you to do more because you expect them to pay more. And so you give them more sophisticated education. And if you can do it in person, it's just always better in person.

But 100.

Yeah, it's 100. But we also, then we have a lot of logistics around catering and events and spaces. And so we have to spin all that up, which we have. We've built a lot of processes to do that very efficiently and kind of spin up some contractor event team to do that and some share from our firm too, some operational team come share into our thrival and help spin some of that up, which is, which is the help we do need because we're just small businesses, you know.

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Yeah, I think we, we did start. It's wild. It, it follows, it's followed us as owners, which I, I don't think we meant to do that on purpose. But as we expand our firm, we have 15 people in our firm. We're virtual. We, we teach a lot of the things we're going through which they found that, which they find valuable. We start Thrival started as really more of an emerging community. Just people. They would start, we would call them cliffjumpers, they would call themselves cliffjumpers. So it was people who had just jumped off the cliff and left another firm and went out on their own or were just doing it on the side and they needed that kind of support. It was a free community then, but it's just gone up market. So now we do need a fully focused entrepreneur that wants to grow and expand. So they're moving out of the technical service. You know, we don't have private equity owned firms or anything like that. So the founder is the person we're teaching or the owner, not necessarily the founder, the owner. And we want to see them in some kind of expansion mode. And that means they're, they're adding team, adding revenue. And that's because um, that's, that brings complexity to their life. It's hard when you expand a firm and grow it. It's really difficult. That's when you really run into a lot of growth ceilings and, and things like that. And so our community is built to solve some of those things, to really teach them around those things, coach them through it. So we need a full time fully focused entrepreneur that is in expansion. They're growing and probably 1 to 10 million is going to be a sweet spot. And then Julie, my partner and I, we do consulting for firms up to 15, 20 million, three or four engagements of consulting per year, which is kind of. And those are one to two year journey. So those are pretty deep consulting engagements typically. So that's kind of the avatar probably very cool.

I imagine if your 15 years ago self could see what all of this has developed into, that's probably going to look pretty wild. Do you think someone's going to listen to this and there's going to be people that are going to go out and do their own thing and see, see a version of community that they can't find that, that you know, they need. They create that space for somebody else. Do you think there was something. I mean I can. The really. The Answer here I think is really obvious. But how do you navigate that as a community runner? Like what gives you the audacity in the beginning and like how much do you actually try to plan out every step of the way vers create a home for a certain type of person. Like what would your advice be to even 15 years ago, Jason?

Well, huh. Probably at that time I would do it the same way. Which you have no clue. You don't even know. I didn't know what a community was. I was just trying to get some friends to not go home and be, be in a place where I could ask them questions. So, so I, I don't think. I just didn't technically know what a community was and probably that's good. When you start a community it's just a really passion driven thing because it, it's a real weird thing. It walks the line of a business but it's totally not a business. And if you, and if you start driving it that way, the community members get a, get that taste real fast and they're like nope, I am not a client, I am a community member. That's the, that's the label. So it's really a passion driven thing initially. But I imagine that's true for any community owner. The ones you see popping up, you're like, yep, they can't help it. They just have got to go start a community. But at some point it does. There becomes economics where you do have to produce education and content and you have to try to ask them to go into courses that support the mission that you're trying to accomplish. So I'd probably do it the same way. And it's probably best that you don't know what you're getting into.

Yeah.

And I don't know that you can plan. I don't know that there's a lot of planning around communities because you. I don't know. At least for us, you had to. We have to really navigate our way through what do they want? Do they need this? Who are we for? Who's joining? Why did they join? And so there's a lot of early years going wait, why did that big firm just say they were interested? We've never had a firm that size. What do they think they could get here? Or what did they hear somebody say that they could get here? That we're actually nervous that we can actually provide. So yeah. So you, you know, you fight imposter syndrome just like you do in any kind of endeavor you start or run.

Yeah. And like the, if you're creating a space that doesn't exist. Like if it finds, if it has legs, it's because it's something new that, that a group of people need.

Yeah.

And you can't set out to run a templatized version of that that looks like something else if it's for somebody totally different.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Communities are not templates. Right. That they are very bespoke places that are very unique. So that's, that's the thing. You need to create something that's very unique. You can do that in a lot of ways by being in a certain. Like we're only for startup firms that are a year old or younger. You know, that that's a, that's a beautiful community, you know, or technology or. Ours is very entrepreneurially focused. Like we want you to get your mba. We want you to level up, become more sophisticated as an operator. Basically. We would expect you to do that. And so we would expect you to take the courses, we would expect you to join and then actually go to the classes and learn. That's what we would want. Or we're not best for you because we're going to keep pushing you to do something you don't want to do, and that's not good for them or us. So.

All right, last question I want to be sure to ask you. Get the old crystal ball out. Community. And so many things are called community now. And even the definition of, you know, it's kind of an ambiguous thing.

Yeah.

What do you, where do you see communities going? Like, what kind of, what do you think is the future of that? I think more people than ever before are coming online. I think there's a greater appetite for my little corner of the world and finding those people. Where do you see all that going?

Yeah, I guess, I guess I see communities even now because communities are becoming ubiquitous. Right. They're all over the world. I'm seeing them all start to niche kind of. You know, even the communities we all know they do. If they're doing it right, they're kind of letting everybody know how diff. What they do very specifically. And it's weird. Communities don't. I don't know if it'll ever get this way. But communities don't compete for members because a lot of members are in multiple communities. A lot of people may not know that. So there's people in our community that are in realize. And that's, that's not uncommon because what you're doing is you're attracting the kind of people who want to learn that way. So they want to get. But they go to different communities because some communities provide things that others don't. So I think they're, they're niching down a little bit. They're starting to. And it could be in services provided or it could be the marketplace that they're serving smaller firms, medium firms, larger firms. Maybe there's a, you know, I think there are larger communities probably for. There are less communities or more training organizations for like even private backed or large firms, you know. You know there are other communities that, that provide that, but they provide more training. It's a little less community. And we're kind of a mix. We do a good bit of training and teaching, but also community, community services too. So yeah, they're, it's like they're niching down it seems. I don't know if that's on purpose or what. What do you think that, what do you think?

Yeah, that's probably the biggest thing that I see is just greater specificity.

Yeah.

And the type of firm you want to run, potentially even the type of clients you want to serve. Yeah, you look upmarket and there is more shared services sort of things. And I don't know that we've seen a community go real hard on that, on for small firms so much so maybe, I don't know, maybe you get some of that. But it'll be, it'll be interesting to see. Like the most powerful thing I ever came upon was making friends that run accounting firms and that, you know, that little baby community that you start just by building those relationships. So I think whatever we can do to enable that for people is kind of the goal.

It is. Cool. Yeah. So yeah, we'll see. And then, you know, our profession is very generational, so there's a, you know, there's an older group exiting and however, however they're doing that through private equity or whatever. So there's a, we're starting to run into a lot of those leaders who, you know, that go, I really can't do anything with this business I built. And it's kind of hard on them and, and they're still not big enough to have private equity be interested. So some of them even in their 60s and 70s are like, I've got to change it. I think there's a guy that would run it if, if I can stop doing it the way I've always done it. So there's, there's, there's some change management happen with a, with a large group that are kind of seeing. I Have to do something or they're going to have to close the door and walk away, which is kind of sad. I think they're realizing that. Yeah, I don't know. We're kind of seeing that. But that might just be because we're. We attract that kind of content or that kind of viewer maybe. I don't know. It's interesting.

I think that's super common. I mean, everybody that's. Does a lot of M and A and looking at scoping out different firms, there's a really common template of just an unappealing firm right now where they're five years from retirement. And it's like the notion of changing all of this and getting the staff on board with a different way of working, like, it's just not appealing.

Yeah. And I know that's hard. That's hard on some of them, but some of them are. I think they're trying. They're going to try. I feel. It feels like they're at a wall and they don't have any choice because they, you know. I don't know. We'll see. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Cool.

Well, Jason, thank you for doing this. We're going to. We'll. We'll share all the links to Thrival and all that in the show notes. Any other. Any other places we ought to point people to. To find you online or anything like that?

Yeah, just, you know, thrival. Thrival.com is good. We put a lot of content on YouTube. Maybe if I can steal some of your subscribers, that would be good. That's.

Sure. I'll send the email list.

But the thing is, they can subscribe to mine and yours at the same time and be.

Oh, that's how that works.

It'd be subscribers on two channels.

Okay, you can do that. Okay.

Listen, dude, I will give you a YouTube class.

Jason's got a great podcast. Is it a podcast or is that what the YouTube content you're talking about?

Well, yeah, it's. Yeah, it's a. We have. We have a podcast, the Thrivecast. We've had that for. Yeah, almost 15 years. That's crazy. We've had that podcast that long, so. We've had that podcast for 15 years. They do put it on YouTube and then we. I also produce just content, you know, about running firms and the market and things like that too, so. And that all gets dumped on YouTube or, you know, podcast aggregator. You can listen to it online, too. So. Yeah.

Okay, cool. Thank you very much, Jason.

Thank you for having me, man. I appreciate it. Jason.

Take care, Sam.