379 How To Handle The Client That’s Too Much Work!

Okay, we've all been there. You got that client that, whoa, it's just taking up way too much of your time. You wade it into something that you didn't properly anticipate, and now you are so far upside down that you're having a hard time even imagining how to have that conversation in a way that doesn't make you look like a dummy for just how badly you foresaw this going. Right. How do we navigate this? We've all been there before. Plus, because you better believe it is a Friday Q and A. Smart questions from the smart people that listen to this podcast. How do I know if I refer work to another firm, it's going to get done? Well, having a partner firm there makes it easier to let clients go. But what if they have a bad experience? How do you build an accounting firm in a small rural market these days? And how to standardize. Standardize the accounting work that is unstandardizable. We've all felt that one before. Come on in. We're going to dig into it. It's Jason on fir. Okay, this is a safe place. This is actually a question that I got. It will feel relatable. I have a large client who's disorganized, and we spend twice the hours on this project that we expected when we were first starting out. The client began with us in May. For several months, I thought, okay, we'll get them sorted out and then we'll be back at what I expected hasn't happened. I have to have capital letters. The talk. Either we raise their fees on bookkeeping and charge them for actual manager hours, or they need to find another solution. What do you do? We've all been there. Oof. Boy, when I started getting into the managed accounting game, doing, like, back office stuff for accounting firms, boy, that was, that was a rude lesson. And just all the different ways that clients can screw up their back office. It's one of those you don't know what, you don't know type situations. And for. We just. We kind of assume that these people have more expertise and experience than they do and like putting together a team of people to do things like, ah, open the mail, pay bill. And it's just like the most common, trivial things that you think anybody can do. They just can't. You run into this in tax, even when it comes to, you know, you pick up a new. A new client, you have those initial conversations with them and you're like, wow, they're so smart. They're so intelligent. I like them because they make me feel intelligent just talking to them. And then you get into the weeds, you see the accounting ledger, you see the backup documentation, and you're like, what on the name of God's green shoebox Lovin dumpster fire back office is this? And before you know, you're up to your elbows and solving their problems because the only way that you can do your job responsibly is to fix them. So he put all this time into fixing and one actually didn't even have this on my list. But one smart piece of wisdom I got early on in my journey of building my own practice was resist the urge. This is, this is a big one for accounting firms. Resist the urge to get everything to a perfect state in month one. Maybe this is the tax accountant in me, but I felt the need to put a tremendous amount of work in because surely if we're going to issue monthly financial statements, they have to be perfect, otherwise how could I ever stand behind them, right? And there are situations where they need to be perfect. If they're going to be used by a third party for something, yes, we have to put a little more, little more importance on that. But if you're stepping into a situation that's just a total mess, the better thing to do than not acknowledge the mess that's there and how incorrect the books are at that point in time. The better thing to do than not acknowledge that is to say that over an arc of X months, we're going to get you to a better place that will ensure the financial statements and accuracy. And this doesn't put the screws to you then to then like somehow be able to know all of the things that are standing in the way of, of the financials being able to be issued correctly and timely. Like until you are fully into the weeds, you won't know every single thing that will go into that. And that's where I would get myself in trouble is of what I knew seemed like it wouldn't be a problem. Maybe it'd be a bit of a crunch to get it done that first time and the financials would be late, but after that it would be fine. And then you get down into the details and you're like, oh my gosh, what have I committed to? Somebody early on told me, resist the urge to try to make everything perfect month one. That was just really smart advice. Five notes that I had written down for this person who had, who had posed this question. 1. Sometimes there is truly like an initial bow wave of work. What is that? What's that even from an initial bow wave, I think that's like when you're in a car fording water. You got to like push that first bit of water and then it gets better or something. Wow, what an awful analogy. Simile, metaphor. Hard to say, but it might be that. It might be that initial thing. We had a couple of those engagements where the first month or two, and it was anytime you step into a new system, that was what it was, was these clients had like proprietary, not proprietary, but industry specific ledger systems that were absolute monsters. And so you're learning all of this stuff for the very first time. And it took a tremendous investment to figure all this out. On the other side of this, it actually became a fantastic moat because we were one of very few accounting firms that could support this tool that this type of business had to use. Became a really good opportunity for specialization. But the first few months on it were an absolute nightmare. And after that, genuinely, I mean, we were looking at spending maybe a tenth of the time that we had spent initially month over month. And so that is real sometimes. But you know what's the really easy trap to fall into is to paint that, that brush like, like paint every bad engagement in those colors. Well, we're just in the first part where it's hard to figure it out. We'll figure it out and then you just eat it in perpetuity. Not every project is like that. And be careful not to fool yourself into thinking that this, this stinker that you're looking at right now will get better. Second note I jotted down, oftentimes we feel an obligation for us and our team to take on everything. Consider if part of this project is better done in house by the client. And sometimes we don't feel like we have permission to push that stuff back on the client. And this is where it can be helpful to understand the makeup of their team and capabilities of their team. There are certain things that are just really hard to get access to and it oftentimes will create work for someone to provide access to that thing to you on an ongoing basis. And sometimes it just makes everybody's lives easier if that thing is managed in house. We had a, a client who was just very distracted, but had a couple core team members that were always with them and always in their ear. And we learned that no matter what we told them, their days were ultimately going to be dictated by what those couple, few people close to them were saying. And after months of us trying to like take over certain things from them to take it off of their plate and that be maybe not undone, but definitely complicated by those folks that they were in touch with and where there was like an immediate information loop there to say that in this case we were trying to take over bill paying kind of cash planning for a group of companies, but they had this like little mini sort of family office that they were still embedded in and, and they were sitting next to those people every single day. And they were just much more in touch with the vendors, the customers, everything that was going on than we were. And we showed them a path to like, okay, our team will be the ones handling that stuff directly. But it got messy when it came to like purchasing and tracking down things that have been done incorrectly and that sort of thing. And we probably hung on to trying to do that engagement for too long before eventually we basically said y' all are better suited handling this yourselves because you're all sitting in a room together. And that's just a much more efficient communication loop. It's not the way that my team works at all. And it's worth being realistic that that wasn't the way that my team worked. But in that case it made sense to put that part of the engagement back on them. Third thought here is all the stress around kind of renegotiating the engagement. Quote, unquote, the talk. It's 100% you that is building up the spookiness of this talk. If you, if you like, remove, I don't know, this notion that it's coming to some sort of climax and instead just walk into a conversation wanting to do kind of exploring the state of the relationship. It is okay to go into that conversation in a more open ended way where it could go a number of different directions. There are certain conversations in life where you have to come in and you've already made up your mind. If you're firing a client, if you're firing a staff person, you don't wander into those conversations looking for a reason to get mad or at a, or creating a justification along the way for why you have made this hard conversation. That's not how you do it. You make the decision ahead of time, you go in, you do the hard thing, you try not to burn the bridge and you move on. But a conversation like this, sometimes we come into these conversations a little too like bullheaded, I think oftentimes with a bit of, with a bit of like self defense in there because maybe it was us to a degree that is at fault for not understanding like the scope of the problems that we were walking into. And that defensiveness when we, when there's like a part of us that, yeah, it was really their fault, but like a little bit of it was our fault. Sometimes that defensiveness can come through in how we approach that conversation. To say that like we're, we're, you know, the bad version of that is coming in with basically an ultimatum to say like, things have got to change, otherwise we're out. You know, if you're going into a healthy state of the relationship conversation, trying to come up with ideas that might just go without saying and is probably worth not saying, we got X, Y, Z or we're out of here. Oftentimes on the client side, they're going to have different insights than you do. You may think that you've created headaches for them where maybe it's actually better than it was before. So just start out by trying to get as much transparency as possible. Particularly if you are doing like a back office managed accounting sort of engagement, the roles and the responsibilities between your team and the client's team can be very fluid. If this is more a tax engagement, the headaches around this usually stem from something very similar. How the accounting gets done and what's going into ensuring that the books are correct. And if you have staff on your side that are fixing the books, doing any aspect of the bookkeeping, you can still have that same conversation to say like, what are the responsibilities on your side of the fence? And on our side of the fence, is it going to be easier if we just take it over? Is it going to be easier to actually push that stuff back on you that you're being difficult about? If we build it up to be quote unquote, the talk, it's, it only serves to stress us out and I think it gets in the way of like coming to the client, trying to truly be a partner of their business and find a mutual solution that works going forward. 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, okay. Liveflow's 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 send to my clients with all the work 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 that the client looks at on their phone every morning or report they check in on every week. Super flexible reporting platform. 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 like flow. Learn more Check out the link down the show Notes this episode is sponsored in part by Makers Hub Renewal Season Cross Sell Alert Bill Pay One of the things that is being changed the fastest by a regular old bill pay but also like crazy technical bill pay got people that are doing like receiving inventory management. This is where like there's mountains of time savings to be had by getting into bill pay. It's actually a great way to specialize your firm, like differentiate you from other providers. If you're looking for a way to get a foot in the door with folks doing, you know, manufacturing anything that requires warehousing, having a service like this that you can crush and come in and get an immediate win with someone. Especially as there's so much marketing hype around AI. If you can be the accounting firm that's like man AI is totally transforming this type of business and our firm is going to come in and show you how really cool opportunity. Makers Hub more than anybody else I've seen is leaning into AI vision models and large language models to push this stuff like to a level that's never before been possible. If you're looking for a way to spice up renewal season, think about bill pay. I did it in my firm led to actually a bunch of other great cash advisory services could be worth checking out. Learn more about Maker sub Check out the link down and in the show notes point number four here the the I think the healthiest way to communicate this sort of thing to be really clear so that they understand that something does have to change without it being this sort of dramatic ultimatum type framing a healthy way to frame this is to say, for a given outcome. So, like, confirm that all parties are still on the same page about what the goal is, like, what you're trying to do. By working together for a given outcome, it's going to demand more or different, more or different people, inputs, whatever that is. The process of how we get to that outcome is going to have to change in order for us to kind of uphold what your goal is like, what you want out of that outcome. And oftentimes we come in and project our own desired outcome on what we want that engagement to look like, when what the client's looking, looking for is like maybe just to understand if they're going to make payroll. And you may not even be delivering a service that actually helps them understand if they're going to be able to make payroll. If you're doing monthly bookkeeping for them, that may help you retroactively understand why you barely made payroll. But it doesn't do anything to help them understand where they're coming in for the next pay run. Right. So it is worth confirming what are the outcomes that we're trying to get to for this engagement. But better than saying, I got to increase your price, I got to do this or that, frame it as given the understanding we have today of how your business works and the outcome that you want to get to, here is what will be required to get there, to truly have it done well. And at this point in time, you have a deeper understanding of their business than anybody else than any other external third party, where they can go to and say, oh, QuickBooks Live bookkeeping cost this or that or this, this other tax prep service costs X, Y and Z. You have an advantage at that point because you are embedded in the business and you know exactly what will go into getting them to where they want to be and as much as they want you to. You can walk them through the steps and, you know, any complications, any nuances specific to their business, somebody that does this really well. Honestly, we talk with Chad Davis a lot on this podcast and he's given me all sorts of examples where they ultimately will help the client hire an internal accounting team to take back part or all of the responsibilities that their firm, like, is performing for them. And there was a stage in my career when I would try to cling to that work as long as possible and trick myself into thinking, no, we're always going to be the best thing for you in perpetuity. Well, that's just not realistic. Right. So it may take putting a little bit of ego aside. But when you have that conversation, it's as simple as outlining for where you want to go. Here is what's going to be required of the inputs. You may not like that, but this is my profession advice for what's going to be required. Last point I had here is that if this tough situation doesn't inform your intake process, if this doesn't cause you to circle back and go back through the meeting transcripts, the notes you had up front as you built this engagement out, if it doesn't inform that process, then you don't have an intake process. Don't build this into your mental voodoo of, you know, so many, so many things in small firms are reliant upon that one person sitting back stroking their proverbial beard and saying, you know, due to my experience and the things that I've seen, this is the right answer. That's not a process. And I understand if you are the beard stroker that any version of a process will look inferior to what you are capable of. But the upside of a process is it can be improved. It's an asset that you're building into your firm. Other people can speak into it and it will raise what the rest of your team is capable of when they have this framework that they can use. Those frameworks are ultimately higher leverage versions of your expertise and ultimately the path to like getting the team and the business to be less reliant upon you. It is a tough situation when you have an engagement like this. It's. But it's a situation that absolutely every single one of us has been in before. It's definitely one of those like, the answer cannot be inaction. You gotta do something. I will add one other note here too. If you are running a team is resist the urge to swoop in and be the hero for your team. Your team will not have a complete understanding of what goes into an engagement and the discomfort of a bad decision and all of that until they are forced to sit in those hard decisions and sit in that discomfort. One of the best things that you can do for your team is have your team fire clients. If you're looking at things like production based pay where team members are paid based on, you know, the work that they or their teams are responsible for. If you're looking at your team sort of taking the lead on what clients are we going to, you know, retire, move along to another firm each year until they're part of the full life cycle of that, that communication, those, you know, talking renewals with clients, talking Changes in scope. Until your team is involved in that entire process, your incentives and the way that you think about those things will not be totally aligned. Common point of frustration with accounting firm owners where their team just wants you to fire clients is, well, the team doesn't understand what went into getting these clients and their referrals from this other great client. We make money on them and they just don't want to. They don't want to have to deal with the discomfort of having to be the one to go fire them. That is a problem of incentives not being aligned. Until your team is compensated in a way that's similar to how you are compensated, and until they have to be exposed to the highs and the lows of the best things that happen on engagements and the worst things that happen, then you just, you're not going to be aligned. Inherently. A really funny thing happened when I did all of the renewals for my clients one December and told my team, the all my account managers, I said, next December you will be doing all of these renewals yourself and it will be up to you to manage conversations around changes in scope. Things that came up during the year that changed the engagement that will be 100% on your shoulders next year. What ultimately led me to ripping the bandaid off and saying, okay team, you are doing all this next year was as I was doing renewals, it was tremendously difficult to see what had changed in an engagement from the start of the year to the end of the year. And we had so much like scope leakage, which honestly in many ways is a good thing. Because if you're doing your job well, that client gradually pulls you into more and more things and that's actually a signal that you're doing a great job. But when it comes time to renew and actually like assign a value to the things that you're doing to them, if I'm removed from that engagement, honestly I'm not the right person to make that assessment. It's the account manager that ought to be. So I had a really hard time nailing those things down. Despite us having a place where we needed to kind of save those notes throughout the year to make renewals easier. And you know what happened next year when they did their own renewals? They had a whole lot better notes to do those renewals than I did because they knew it's going to be me. I'm going to be the one on the hook for having those uncomfortable conversations. Increases in scope. It impacts my compensation. If we're doing production based pay as A whole different level of incentive to have those uncomfortable conversations. Resist the urge to be the hero for the rest of your team and isolate them from those hard decisions. Are the discomfort that's associated with that. Also, give yourself a break because you're always going to get these things wrong. Just don't get the same things wrong over and over again. Another question from a podcast listener. How do you know that the firm you send your clients to will do a good job? You don't, but I can understand this as kind of a. A point of fear or resistance to the notion of. I'm a. I'm a big believer that if I have a great referral network of other firms that I can send clients to, it makes me faster to fire clients because I don't have the guilt of that client not being taken care of. The reality is, if that client's not a great fit for me anymore, my heart's not going to be in serving them and I'm not going to take great care of them. And I think we have to remove the blinders we have. That makes us think we are the best thing there could ever be for that person. That's like, unless you are jacked about serving that client, you just aren't the best thing for that client. But how do you start those referral relationships and do that for the first time? I mean, basic things to look out for as you're communicating with that other firm. Are they responsive to you? Have you had a chance to get a peek into their systems and understand how they serve their clients? Like understanding their. Their sort of their packages and stuff like that? Is, is very important to ultimately know. Is the way that I serve this client today, is that going to map over to the way that this other firm serves clients? If it doesn't, that's not a good referral. Right. And the process and getting an understanding of how they do that stuff, you're going to see things like you're a firm owner. You're going to be opinionated on how other people run their firms. There are versions that are different to what you do that can still be good, but then there are versions that are different to what you do that are also just inferior. And so you got to have like a deep enough conversation with that firm to at least get a taste of. Of what they're doing. Double check some public sources. Like if Google reviews are just an absolute dumpster fire and they're not acknowledging those. If their website is a disaster, where you making, you know, you referring that client over to that firm. The first thing the client's going to do is go to their website, check out their social media. If there's problematic stuff there, you want to check that out before you refer somebody to them. But then even after making the referral, it is okay to ask those clients for feedback. You know, if it was a tax client, don't be afraid to ask the client how it went. Like, after a filing cycle, like, this is you as a fellow entrepreneur being like, hey, I just wanted to check in. Like, do you feel like you got taken care of? I had a couple other clients that I'm thinking about sending to this firm, but wanted to check in to see how things were going. That's a totally okay thing to do. It may feel a little bit underhanded, like you're sneaking this past the other firm, but the reality is I'm going to work in service of my clients, probably my former clients, ahead of, you know, this other firm. And I don't think it's. It is underhanded to ask those clients. Do you feel like you're getting taken care of still? Because I'd like to know that before I send, you know, 10 more clients over the fence. Also, another really good filtering mechanism here in order to find those firms is do you have some common thread of context? You know, like, things as simple as, do they listen to this podcast like you do? And that sounds really silly and really arbitrary, but if there is a core ambition and sort of framework for how you want to run your accounting firm, we're not all there today, but many of us that, you know, I'm using this podcast as kind of a common watering hole because when you have folks that consume the same stuff, oftentimes their, their mindset for how to do this all is. Is going to be much more common than. Than some other person that consumes other stuff. You'd be surprised how much that sort of common context will get you to all kind of try to be swimming in the same direction, even if you're doing so different ways. And we are, are doing so at varying levels of success. And so if you have any of those watering holes that you hang out in, like, be it an online community, you know, a LinkedIn group, whatever that is that common thread is, that's a good place to start if you're looking to source firms that could be a good fit for those referrals. Thank you for the question. Your questions make everybody smarter. Whenever you have questions, man, drop that stuff down in the comments. I will admit it has actually been harder for me to keep up with comments than it has been in the past just because the volume, which, which is awesome. The volume is harder than it's ever been across email and social media and, and YouTube comments and all that stuff. I still get to all of them today. I don't know if I will forever. It just takes me a little longer than it used to. This episode is sponsored in part by Ramp Gang. New Year's resolutions. They are just around the corner. They're be creeping up, creeping up any old day. Now my resolution for you is for your clients to stop using stanky old financial products. Kay. So many bookkeeping workflow issues and even fraud issues could be easily presented today. Presented, prevented. That's what they could be today. Easily prevented by a better banking and card stack. Did he just. What did he just say? Yeah, banking and card stack. It's tech buddy, your client that just bumbled on into the Wells Fargo across the street. The Chase, whatever it is, is a better option. Ramp, it's a spend management platform. It's going to save you a whole pile of headaches when it comes to bookkeeping workflows and when it comes to your clients being able to allocate spend to members of the team. I'm not talking about the office card that they can go out and get donuts with and buy staplers. No, like responsible spend management and you, the accountants. Like we're actually in a pretty good spot where we can be advisors here and help them modernize their money. Tech stack, okay. I'm a happy user myself. We actually use Ramp internally. It's a good tool, good platform. Learn more the link down in the show notes this episode is sponsored in part by True Prep. True Prep's like a cool, almost like a chatgpt like experience for tax firms that lets you query your actual client tax data to be like, I don't know, we're do some tax planning. Show me. Show me every 1040 that had over 5000 in tax penalties last year. Like you can literally do that. Returns the whole list. That'll even let you drill into the detail. Does some other cool stuff now too, like basic tax research. Like they've built IRS publications some background information into the platform. Client asks a quick question, you wanted to draft a little memo like draft response to the client. It's a great starting point. Also they've even got like a very basic kind of built in year over year projection tool now. So let's say your W2 is going to double, but your withholdings won't like. What will that look like year over year? True Prep's even getting into stuff like that. It's the closest thing to like an open ended chat resource for your tax firm. Very cool. Worth checking out. Learn more about True Prep the link down the show notes how to run an accounting firm or build an accounting firm in a small rural market. I thought this was an interesting one that's probably going to resonate with a few of you. I think I got this one over email so I won't share who it was. We have six staff members, including myself, preparing 850 returns and have 200 monthly bookkeeping clients. We're located in a a rural location in the Midwest, which isn't a destination for young accountants. Our Edge we specialize in farms and live in an agricultural community. We have three to four deep touch points with our farm and business clients every year. We do their accounting on our system and plan with them for cash flows, taxes, transitions and expansions. We're an inch wide, but a mile deep with our clients. Our Challenge we live in a rural, analog, tolerant community, so we haven't so we have been given a pass for our slow adoption to tech and AI. But we feel we need to figure out a new identity as a firm if we're going to stay relevant. We're not getting younger clients because our processes are too inefficient and not collaborative enough for them. We're chips all in on the Thomson Reuters Suite Accounting CS Ultra Tax Fixed Assets practice. Yes. Which has begun to feel like an anchor instead of a sale. Yes, tech stacks hurt hurting you there. But how do you navigate that when you're in a geography that is kind of analog? I mean, they called out the biggest thing here, I think, which is until you acknowledge the imperative of redefining the way that your firm works, you won't actually attract the client that you want. That is the future safe client. And so often we're afraid of changing what our firm does because we think about the clients we have today and how that impacts them. But you're stuck between this notion that, you know, what you have today obviously isn't attracting the person that you want and isn't particularly suited for that. Next a client you could bring in the door. And that's one of those situations where you just have to have the conviction and the courage to change your firm to be better for who you want because you're never gonna get who you want until you become the best place for who you want. Right now, the Worst version of this is like C and D clients holding you back from evolving to better support your A clients. But a few thoughts here. One, there may be kind of some local hacks here. I actually shared this in a, in a YouTube video recently. Like every community has watering holes and they could be, you know, a John Deere parts dealer, could be the dental supply person that goes around to every single clinic. Like consider who those hubs are and how you can get plugged into them. A friend I've got who is a listener to the podcast, running a firm in a very small rural area. One hack that he kind of stumbled into is they have a university in their town and by building a relationship with that university, I think he actually does some teaching. He's able to pull in folks like as interns, college age kids, it's a struggle still to keep them after they graduate. But he's got basically this unique resource of folks that he can pull in to do the work in the firm due to that relationship with the university. So is there a regional specific advantage like that that you could lean into? Second thought on tech, when you are fully on a legacy system, you will overanalyze and just overthink this one to death because it feels like such a big change. The solution is one change at a time. No matter how big the change you have to make is, you have to start one change at a time. Start with the highest impact change. In the case of a firm like this, it's either a better practice management system or a tax intake system because that saves a tremendous amount of time when it comes to information gathering on 1040s. Third thought in 2024, geography really doesn't need to dictate how you build your practice. If you feel trapped by where you are, that's a choice. Like, just know that that's a choice. Now, serving people locally, it is different than serving people in a distributed way. Like there's a lot of folks that enjoy going into an office and that's completely fine or want to like literally sit down with their clients. And on the flip side, there's a lot of clients who still appreciate that and prefer that comes with trade offs as far as how much you can niche down because you don't have access to the same volume of potential connections when it's just local. But if you're feeling trapped by the market that you're in, just know that that is 100% a choice. And there's probably as many, if not more distributed firms these days as actual like firms that exclusively work with local clients. And that can feel like a big scary change if it's something that you haven't done before. But just like changing that tech stack, you just gotta start one client at a time. I mean Covid made everybody comfortable getting on Zoom meetings pretty much. So if you are, if you are not excited about continuing to invest in that market, then don't like start, start exploring stuff. A more distributed way to run your accounting firm. Last, how do you standardize work that's really hard to standardize. This is a listener. We mostly work with startups. They're based in another country and specialize in working with US connected entities from that country. So service packages tend to be bespoke and involve more hand holding as our contacts are all doing different things. But in this other country, I know I need to bite the bullet. Take three days to sit, sit down and review our services, come up with our renewal offers. Maintain the notion that we are a boutique firm offering a premium, premium service. Step into that premium pricing a bit more and probably lose a few clients along the way. And tips on navigating this. It's just intimidating. Always worth considering. What if you don't? Right. This is you not doing it is the worst possible scenario, like not getting aggressive, more aggressive about pricing. Ultimately you are the one who pays the price for that more than anybody else if you don't have the courage to do it. So while the easy path feels like not doing anything, that's actually the hard path. Remember, hard decisions, easy life. Easy decisions, hard life. But when it comes to very bespoke engagements like this, I actually think this is a pretty good place to be positioned as an accounting firm. It's. It is the hardest stuff to automate and inherently makes you a little more specialized. Particularly in this case where you're supporting folks in a country outside the U.S. who have connections to the U.S. that's a really cool like high value specialization. Not to say it can't get more specialized, but those, those types of businesses with very specific needs. That's a good place to set up shop. But let me give you some tough love here. There is no version of an accounting firm that can't be made more standardized. And standardization and making things turnkey. It's not a binary thing where you either are or you aren't. It's a massive, massive spectrum that looks different for everybody based on how a boutique and how truly nuanced your firm is. Your job as the operator is to just move it down that spectrum just a bit in A way that doesn't compromise the value you deliver to your clients. And this is a skill that is learned over years of running an accounting firm. There's versions of making it more standardized that hurt the value you deliver to clients. And sometimes that is worthwhile. Like if you can 10x your output and it halves the value of what you deliver to clients, maybe that's worthwhile. But how to do one without torpedoing the value? This is a skill. And so your job is not to somehow jeopardize the identity of the firm, because ultimately, what's most important is how clients perceive the value of what you do, but your job is to take the firm just a bit down that standardization spectrum. Now, we can't get too fixated on workflow, because workflow, as much as we like to geek on it and tech and all that stuff, is still ultimately secondary to what, what people are willing to pay you for what you do. No amount of operating efficiency, you know, getting 10, 20% more efficient, that will not turn a 10% margin firm into a 40% margin firm. @ the end of the day, it's about how people perceive the services that you provide, how easily they can find cheaper substitutes to you, and what they'll ultimately happily pay you to do the work. Now, step one for thinking through standardization more. We did a whole week of this on the podcast, is develop your internal service library. That is not the services that we hold up externally and present to clients. That is developing an internal vernacular for all of the things that we do for clients. And in the beginning, it's a complete mess. Like, the way I recommended you start this exercise is you get everybody on the team into a room, you know, in person or virtual, and you just put up on a whiteboard or on a whole bunch of sticky notes. What are all the different things we do for all of our different clients? And the goal is to put all that stuff up on the wall and ensure that this is the worst that it will ever be. Because absent a service library and absent internal agreement on what things you do and do and don't do for clients, every single engagement takes on a life of its own, and it becomes one of one. They all trend in different directions. The magic of developing this service library is because you have something that the firm has agreed upon to say, this is our preferred way of doing xyz, from big things to little things, like, how do you gather payroll hours? How do you set up bank rules? What are you supposed to do with receipts? They're the kind of things where unless you have an opinionated take on we're going to do X, Y, Z, you end up just defaulting into something that the accountant decides in the moment or is the client's preference, but they really don't care at the end of the day. So the magic of this service library is once it exists, those engagements over time actually start trending to be more similar for the first time. The natural order of things is the opposite. They all get more different over time, but once you have a service library, they magically start kind of trending back to be similar. And it's not to say that they will all be the same, they certainly won't. But the goal is, you know, if we have a bookkeeping to service in our service library, the firm knows what that means. And I can hand that to anybody on my team. And they know how to do bookkeeping too, for any set of books. It doesn't mean that there aren't still 10 exceptions for that client, but what I want is for 80% of the engagement to be easily understood by anybody on my team and then to build documentation for the last mile for the last 20%. This is where we can move from having to create bespoke SOPs for every single client engagement individually, to instead building SOPs for our service library and only having to build documentation on specific client engagements for the exceptions for the stuff that falls outside the norm. And I don't care how different and complicated and like unique all of your engagements are. All engagements have overlap and that's where you start with your service library. Again, the goal is just to baby step into being able to be a little bit more standardized, build those systems for the first time. Because if you don't try to do that intentionally, you become incredibly over reliant upon expertise around tribal knowledge and people just remembering how to do that engagement for that client. I had the same problem. We were like, I built this managed accounting practice and we were doing just about anything anybody would ask us to do. After 18 months we're like, okay, we got to hit pause on this and start figuring out how to standardize. And it's honestly amazing. You go through a couple renewal cycles since we set up those service libraries and things just look completely different. So many of these engagements had trended back towards the norm. What our recommendation is, because doing receipt management a certain way for the 32nd client on your list is a whole lot easier than the client saying, how do you want to manage receipts? And you saying, I don't know what's easiest for you. Where do they live right now? And then you're doing like some bespoke thing for them on their Google Drive or something like that, right? On my YouTube channel there's a short version of that service library thing. In fact, let's link that one in the show notes. It's kind of the, the, the TLDR of that week on the podcast that we spent on it. Give that a watch if that resonates with you. Then it'll hand you off to the podcast series and actually a bunch of free resources we developed to make that as easy as possible for you to roll out. Gang, thanks for coming and hanging this week. Thanks for the questions. Keep them coming. If you're listening to the audio version of this, your pod player will have a link to the YouTube video. Just click through there. Drop a, drop a comment on the YouTube video. I usually reply right there. And a lot of those, we end up pulling into these Q and A's. Thanks for coming, hanging. I'll see you in the next one.