403 This Guy’s Been On Production Pay for 12 Years!

Back by popular demand, the one and only Matthew Patrick. We had him on the pod in the past to talk about his humongous payroll practice. Excuse me, somebody wants to run a payroll practice in 2025. Super, super sharp guy. But we're talking production pay this week. And when I put out the call to say, who should I talk with to learn about production pay, everybody was like, matthew Patrick. Matthew Patrick. So this was a super fun conversation. Like, he is one of the most wise firm runners that I know. I think you're gonna like it. If, if anything, I think he's actually a great snapshot of, of how it evolves over time because he's now got a setup that's like, it's pulling in all sorts of different things from different team members. And on the one hand it's like, ah, is that overwhelming? Because I'm still over here and I haven't even started yet. But I think my takeaway after talking with him was like, no. When he started, it was super basic too. It's kind of hard to compare yourself to someone else who's been doing it for, for 12 years. I can tell you for myself, when I talk with, with Matthew, I'm like, okay. Like he, he's got something figured out. And the fact that he still swears by this and even having done it for over a decade now, he's like, I. I would still do it the exact same way. Actually goes a really long ways for me. So without further ado, here's Matthew. I think you're going to. Okay, we got Matt Patrick back. We actually, last episode we did with you people. Absolutely loved it. So I'm thrilled to have you back and talk.

All the payroll nerds.

All the payroll nerds pumped to have you back. Talking production pay this week. If anybody hasn't met you before, what's like the 32nd intro to Matthew Patrick?

Yeah. Started my firm in 2004. Been doing about 20 years now. We're very small business focused accounting firm. And then we have the payroll services firm called works. We do payroll, hr, employee benefits. And I just love being part of the accounting community. It's great. Love the empathy of others, which is huge for me. All the pains that we all suffer doing this job. So I, I love being part of the community.

100%. 100%. That was such a big change for me before I knew that was a thing too then. Like having friends. Such a change.

I always felt a little bit before I got plugged into other groups. It was like the community just. I Thought I was alone. And then I'm like, oh, wait, there's a bunch of idiots like me doing this same thing. Same thing. So I've really been lucky to be a part of a lot of good groups. So, yeah, great.

Yeah. Well, we got a bunch of idiots that listen to this podcast that are interested in production pay. Yeah, that's great. Way to kick things off, insult the whole audience. The theory of it, you know, you can explain it to people and they're like, oh, yeah, that totally makes sense. Solves a lot of problems. You're kind of trading the game of the 40 hour workweek for, I would say, a different game in some ways, but I'd probably argue a better game. But it really probably all comes down to the details and the implementation and all that. And I know you're fully bought into this. I want to start, though, start going back to the very beginning of this, of what it looked like when you started doing this and what problems you thought it could solve for you.

Well, we've always been a pretty growing firm, and so actually I remember what I used to bill when I was at Deloitte per hour, and then what I made and how pissed off I was all the time. And so every time they I worked more, I just got more work and no more money. And I always really, that drove me crazy. And so when I started my firm, right in the beginning, it was, you know, you want to hire people at a really good rate of pay, making sure that you can pay them as much as you possibly can, but also still drive a profit. And you also have the tendency to not want to micromanage every detail of their day. So for me, the big thing I really was looking to accomplish was, hey, I want them to win when we win. If they're not efficient, I'm okay with them not winning. So I want to make sure that those things become very transparent. You know, if a client is not in process and we're not doing the things to coach them into process, then that's a problem. And. And so for me, it was a way to kind of go of my ADD tendencies a little bit and say, I really want you to work a professional 40 hours, do the stuff you have to get done. With a production mindset of getting the stuff done is winning in an efficient way. And then I kind of want you to constantly looking at, can we do this better? And that was my starting point for production. You know, I felt like my computer realistically didn't change, but it proved that we could drive More production out of, out of the work that we're doing mainly just through managing processes better.

How long ago is this that you rolled it out?

We've probably been on production. We were probably 20, 11 or 12 when we rolled it out.

Okay.

And we tried to do it, you know, from earlier, even earlier than that. But you know, a, you have to have the right people with the right mindset. You have to have the amount of work that allows you to have a big enough book of business for them to be able to drive efficiencies in it. So if you don't have enough multi bookkeeping work and you're having them do three or four things as you're growing, it's hard for them to necessarily be purely on production. And that's a common problem I see with firms as they're growing is okay, I have them doing some tax work and I have them maybe doing some admin work and they're doing bookkeeping and then they're also helping this other and like that gets production pay gets really hard when you're having them do different types of work. And that's some of the challenges I had when I was still early on.

Yeah. What with what you know now what would you say, is there a tipping point where you get to X number of people or revenue where it gets easier?

Well, I, I think having people from the very beginning come in with the mindset of oh, I kind of, I'm almost money motivated folks. You know, some people aren't money motivated. They, they want a secure place and they want the routine and that's great. Having the right mindset of employee coming on board of your team is a critical spot, part of that, but also explaining to them the win. So hey guys, if you could find five more minutes a client and you can add and you have 50 clients, how much work could you make next month? And if you think about that five minutes a client is could be as simple as implementing holding the client accountable to getting us the stuff when we want it. Like it's not rocket science. When you start thinking through like five minutes a client. Fifty clients turn 50 minutes a month. That's, that's a lot of work. The thing I think that early on when I go back to think through the challenges I had was we had to kind of figure out the math, you know, so what is a reasonable expectation of the work? You know, how long is it, how good a job do we do at pricing? So we may have had a pricing problem or we have a process problem or we have a people problem and you have to kind of understand where that lies. A lot of firms I know in PASBA and firms that have gotten into this and want to implement it, a lot of times it starts with pricing. If you're not pricing right, production pay is not going to work. I mean, them making a percentage of you not making any money is not a great number. So that's kind of the common problem. And then, you know, and then also I'd say kind of understanding how much of their time is being spent in the production world versus non productive world. So if they are, you know, let's say they're doing, you know, sales or marketing or admin, like that, small firms, those people are, you know, they may be helping with some administrative tasks that aren't necessarily production oriented. You know, allocate the time that makes sense for what they're doing between those two tasks and do the math there. And then it takes a chance to evolve. There's a lot of methodologies doing it. You know, our methodology is we pay the greater of the percentage of production or their salary. They get their salary every month. And if they make money on production, it's like a bonus. There's some firms that do salary plus, so they'll do salary plus 2% of production or 1% of production or whatever. We're more of a traditional in this route where I believe this is the incentive. You know, hey, your salary may be 60 grand, but if you can earn 80 grand, I'm all for it. And if you can do that not working more than 40 hours a week, even better. So that's kind of our, our, our primary purpose there.

Okay, I got a hundred questions on the mechanics I want to get into. But when you were, when you were early days, we've been talking about like pod structures and org charts lately. What's the ballpark threshold and how you developed your org chart to where you got to the point where you're like, okay, these people's jobs, you know, are really just a crank on production. And so this model makes sense. Is that 5 people? Is it 20 people? Where would you say that is?

I had, I probably had five people at that time that were on production pay. Our staffing model at that time was we'd have a staff person and a manager on most accounts. My goal, my target was could I keep my production labor cost at under 40% of revenue? So doing that math for simple math at this point, you know, let's say I'm paying 20% to a staff and 20% to the manager, the staff person's production, they won't be able to do as much in their 20% just because there's more time involved in it. And on the manager side reviews and the client service stuff, they're going to get 20% of all those revenues. So we found, you know, early on that, you know, an average staff person should be able to handle about $300,000 of annualized work, and a manager should be able to handle about half a million dollars of annualized work. That's kind of our numbers at that.

Time is that overlapped. So like for a staff person, that 300 is included in some other managers, 500 as well.

Yep, for sure. So we, we do the pool is the same. So client that pays us $1,000 a month. That could be two different managers or that could be a staff and a manager on this account and a staff and a different manager on another account. And so our pool is, you know, we're getting $1,000 and we know we have 400 bucks in labor costs kind of attached to that. And that's kind of how our math has kind of worked. And we're at the time we were probably, when we first started this, we were probably trying to make an effective rate of somewhere around 50 bucks an hour. And now we're probably closer to $200 an hour just through inflation over the last few years. But that same percentage is still my mark. That 40% of labor cost is kind of where I want to keep my overall labor in production. And we drive efficiencies to that through administrative staff and extra support. You talked about this recently on a pod, which is, you know, we've hired a lot of non accountant roles in our system and they're built into the production times too. So our percentages have gotten a little weird. We have work that's split up multiple ways. So we do a bunch of accounts payable works. We have an accounts payable team. They're getting a piece of incentive. Now you've got, we have a senior role today in our pods. So we have a staff senior manager in our pods. And that's kind of bastardized our percentages, but the math still maths. And so we basically work backwards from what is reasonable based on the amount of time, effort, efficiencies we should see. And we're kind of testing that all the times. And we tweak percentages if we need to. We've never had to go down. I mean, that's a good thing. So we're only We've had to tweak it up and, and then as we split work up, we talk about the fairness of it and who's getting the work and who's doing the work there. It's not overly complicated if you only have a couple people doing shared work. It gets a little more complicated when you have three people doing it and taxes with a tax repair who's not the, you know, the manager who's reviewing it and then who's handling the client service. So it gets a little complicated when you start thinking through how you're allocating your dollars. But for the most part, it's, it's, it's fairly, you know, it's fairly straightforward and you just have to make some best educated guesses on the front and kind of measure it for a little bit, make sure you're right.

Yeah, that's, that's where I think people's heads are going. And it gets, from the outside, it gets extremely complex. But the reality is when you started, you had something simple and it's been a step at a time.

Yeah, it doesn't have to be perfect. We probably ran it for a year and nobody was on it. So as we were figuring this out, we're running a methodology of it. It's taking us less. We're still going to calculate it every month and go, yeah, our numbers are off, or hey, you know what, our pricing's off, or hey, we have, you know, 100 clients and 70 of them are really out of process or whatever it was at the time. And it's part of the evaluation of is incentive possible? And you also will have one person that can easily get it and another person who's in the exact same role isn't getting it. And that could be, is it them problem? Is it a client problem? Is it, you know what, what's that dynamic? And so it brings to light some of those issues. For sure.

I ought to force a conversation.

Yeah, I, I love, I wrote, you know, my biggest thing on incentive is that it should aware that, I mean, it should bring the staff awareness into the money we're making for the work we're doing. More than anything we do. The staff should be, if they're accountants, they should be looking at the math here and going, I'm making 32 cents an hour on this work. What the hell am I doing? And so I think it should be like, I don't know how. I mean, I remember when I was a staff, I probably didn't attach what I was doing to dollars. And I really hope that this does get them into the economics of the firm going, hey, I can drive efficiencies here and I'll make more money.

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So staff person for me is around 60 grand. My manager's around 100, give or take in our market in Memphis.

So it's really only a scenario where they are, I guess, outperforming where they're going to get, you know, an extra amount on top of that base.

Yeah, I mean, so our staff, we do a calculation every month they get a, you know, let's say they're making 60 grand, they're getting $5,000 a month in their salary. And then let's say they have incentive, and they earned another 600 bucks on incentive. You know, that's a nice little kicker. And it, and it shows that they're on my mind. I can see they're being efficient, and we're still looking at hours in our world. You know, I want to make sure they're not working 60 hours to make 600 more dollars. That doesn't make any sense. But we, you know, we from the very beginning are doing that math. From, you know, their first month in production, we're starting to see how far. How many more clients they need to get on production or how efficient they need to get. So we're looking at effective rates on the work. You know, so if we had this client historically, and it's. And it's been something we've been doing for a while, and we're now, we went from doing $200 an hour to $100 an hour, they're gonna have a hard time getting on incentive. And so we have to do some coaching and training and developing of the staff to get them there and find out where the roadblocks are for their efficiencies. It's been really, I mean, for me it allows me to know when I'm investing in training, if my labor rate as a whole, the firm gets up above 40% that usually means either I've hired excess capacity for future growth and not everybody's on incentive yet, or we have a younger group of people that are still in training and development mode, which is always seems to be the case, or we're pricing deals bad. So it's one of those things happens pretty, pretty, pretty quickly. And it comes pretty transparent. For me, our managers are a little different. So our managers, our incentive, they calculated that on the quarter, not on the month because they're more involved in the tax side of things. And so that seasonality of tax has some tendencies for the numbers that kind of get weird. And so we reset their salary every year based on their incentive they made the year before. So if they were 100 grand salary and they made 115 grand this year on, on incentive, next year their salary is 115. And we're trying to see if we can't get them. Yeah. So it kind of, it's kind of like a pre raise is why I think about it.

Interesting. You just do that with the tax staff?

We do that with everybody. Yeah. Now there's a lot of firms that don't ever change their base or they'll change it for inflationary cost of living. But I kind of feel like if their book of business hasn't changed, I've kind of proven that that's where they should be at comp wise. And so now we're trying to find the next five minutes of client. So that's where I'm hoping that they kind of keep trying to improve that.

So a few scenarios where I think where people pick this apart is like the politics of, of it all. So if you're going to make another hire, you add a person. You got to, you got to get stuff on their plate. They're not going to be into the end of the bonus straight out of the gate. But how do you, how do you get them there without taking stuff off of other people's plate in a way that could make them go backwards? Right.

That is a perfect question that happens all the time. That question on what do you do when a new person starts? Is one of the biggest challenges. And what we've done, we've developed training sections. The legacy staff keeps the incentive because I want them to invest in training and developing the new person. Oh, so they start with a training section of 20 or 25, 15 or 20 clients, whatever that is. And for the first few months, they're going to be the helper on the legacy staff's work, which means that person is supposed to be helping them get up and running part of our training plan. And as we add new clients, we will start taking those back to the legacy staff. It takes about 12 months to build a section in our world most of the time. And so that first year, you know, by the end of the year, we're hoping that they're hitting, they've transitioned and added enough work to do that. Plus our staff sometimes will let clients go because they're going to take on a new client or they're progressing up. So our staff are moving into senior. So they're going to take on either more complex work or doing other things. So we try not to mess with that. Senior is probably the hardest one to maintain incentive at all times because you're constantly kind of juggling their progression. In our world of senior is just a person who's on the ramp to manager. So they're going to be handling more tax, more complicated work, working on developing client relationship skills more than the production itself. So that role's a little weird. And so we've done that with just higher percentages of incentive for the work they do.

Is the manager on production pay also or are they separate?

Yep, managers are on production pay. They're in our world, they're getting a percentage of their production monthly on their monthly accounting work. So our fees are, we have a year end fee that's wrapped into our monthly fee. So let's just say we're getting five grand a year for their tax return or four grand a year for their tax return. They'll get half of that every month for the, what I call the client service piece. So meeting with the client, talking to the client, doing all the other stuff and then they'll get another half of that incentive when they do the tax return. So that in case we move a client at tax time or the staff prepares it or something, so the tax creates its own little isolated bucket. And that seems to work fairly well because the manager really is more about managing the relationship in our world.

So you end up with this. The calculations got more complex over time, but ultimately folks haven't had to go backwards ever.

Well, they're never going backwards for sure. I mean, the only time we ever go backwards would be, you know, large client drop in their section could obviously impact their comp them letting clients get out of whack. And so if they're getting out of process and they're not as efficient. That means they're not growing. And at some point we have conversations there, but most of the time it's. We've had to put more people into the mix, and that's part of our having to figure out the new allocation.

Is there a type of work this isn't suited for? Like, do you do this on payroll stuff as well, or are you doing it on everything?

I don't do it on payroll. And it's actually come up a little bit. There are some firms that do it in payroll. Our payroll work is so batch or oriented at this point. I mean, we're processing a couple hundred a day, you know, and we're submitting one ACH file. So it's really hard to know, you know, how many payrolls did you process? We do know the dollars you. That you're attached to. Our biggest clients could take us almost no time. And so it. The client submitting everything in an import way, processing isn't any time, but we're getting. You know, we have 300 employees in our. In our world, we don't have a lot of time in that work. We have a lot of system and customer service side of things, which is we don't. We don't pay incentive on that. We have different bonuses for payroll, but just not. But not incentive pay.

Under incentive pay, is it all strictly percentages of revenue or are there any. Any perks or deviations from that?

I mean, in our world, and when I think about a production pay, that's incentive. But we have other bonuses. So we have a. Each pod has a team bonus that we do based on percentage out the door during the month. You know, so we have three dates during the month that we want to have. Like, we want 40% of our stuff out by the 14th, 75% up by the 21st, and 95% up by the 25th. And if the team hits those numbers, there's a pretty substantial bonus there. And then we have profit sharing that we share monthly with everybody in the firm. So there's other ways. And then we also do what we call M2C2 bonuses, which is meaningful monthly client contact outside of the norm. So we want to. We track how much we're actively and proactively reaching out to clients. And there are some bonuses attached to them, hitting certain percentages of that a month. That one does not get hit as much as I would like. So that's just normal. You know, we get lost in the weeds.

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Well, 40%'s my number. I, I, I really go back to what's the effective rate you're really wanting to make on the work? And where do you want your, your labor dollars in production to really be? You know, some people may want it to be 50%, some people want that to be 25%. I don't know your practice, but in my world that's 40%. And I want an effective rate of, of $200 an hour on everything that we do. I just went back to the math and went, okay, I believe, and I kind of worked backwards to what does the math say in order for me to make $2 an hour? What does that really look like if I want to keep that at 40%? And that's kind of how I did it. The starting point for me is make sure you have really clear lines on who's getting the assigned work. And that the more that that stuff is, you know, I'll say if you're putting that stuff into a queue and every month having to determine who's like, if it's tax work and you're putting your tax work into a queue and who first in, first out, and whoever grabs it, I think that's going to be a challenge to track your incentive with that stuff. Unless you have the systems and processes to make that pretty easy. If you're doing bookkeeping work, for instance, I would imagine your staff accounts are doing the same accounts every month for the same amount of money. And we have fixed fee pricing. So to the extent that you don't have fixed fee pricing, get fixed fee pricing. And this makes this a lot easier. But, you know, I think you could do it with hourly pricing as well. I just don't think it's any motivator to work faster. But yeah, so I would start with doing my math. I believe that in my world, our staff should be easily handling $300,000 of work a month a year. That's $25,000 a month. A staff person should be able to handle that's not a hundred percent. There's obviously another person involved. QC and client leadership. But the actual production of the work that, that math makes help.

You mentioned segments a couple times. Is that kind of like your pod setup?

Yep.

What, what is your, what do those look like today?

Yeah, we have a team lead, another manager usually on the team. One man. One of our teams has three, one of them has two. We're in the process of moving to our third pod. We have a couple seniors on those teams. One's more of a younger senior and one's probably almost manager. And then we have a couple staff and an intern and we have our outsource, our offshore labor in those pools. So each team has about six or seven people.

Okay, and did you say the manager was like a client facing manager? Not, not like a people manager?

Yeah, they're, they're client facing managers. So they're all client service. They all have a section of 50 to 60 accounts.

What, what's the worst part of this?

You talked about that, you talked about your pods and I agree that there's definitely a calling for a client, somebody that's more client facing. And I'm interested in the front of house, back of house of how your pods are set up. It's very interesting to think that through. Making sure the client experience is right with that is a little weird and that you're not playing phone, you know, telephone internally with those stuff. And that's kind of where I've, we've evolved it and thought it through a little bit. And right now our, our offshore team is not client facing. Our onshore team is all client facing. And our staff and seniors all onshore are definitely working towards the mindset. We only bring in staff today on a shore that we think are eventually going to be managers.

How do you juggle that now?

There's a lot of value in them, but we just haven't needed that.

Yeah, how do you juggle that now? Because you can have bookkeeping, tax, bill pay and payroll on an engagement. How do you manage the passing a client around issue today?

So in our world, the staff accountant owns the bill pay, communications and the client enter intake. We have an admin that helps with intake. But the client relationship, when it comes to day to day bookkeeping, the manager is the client relationship person. So when I say relationship like strategic tax planning, talk about financials, that's going to be the client relationship. The client manager, payroll, we keep it pretty separate. They have a payroll person that they deal with 100% internally. You know, we have good visibility into communications and all things, so payroll is fairly systematized for us. And so that we don't have too much of that problem. Our client has three or four contacts in our firm that they're dealing with, and we're trying to overly communicate what they do. But if they were to go to the county manager for a payroll question, it's not the client's responsibility to get it to the payroll person. It's our teams.

So with where you're at right now, what is the worst part of this or the hardest thing to manage? Or is there a, you know, a radical alternative that you think about sometimes where it's like, oh, if I could just throw it all out, maybe I would do this?

Well, we've talked about, you know. Well, the starting point of this for me is do we have the tools and systems in place to make this as automated as possible, the measuring of it, measuring of it calculation, all that. And so we were on practice CS for a long time and we had gotten that dialed in pretty well for production pay. And as we transitioned to count, that hasn't been as clean reporting not being count strength yet. We have the data and so we tend to spend more time manually doing that than I wish. Luckily though, this we, we put the burden on calculation on the staff and managers to calculate themselves and get reviewed so their section doesn't change month from month to month. So once they establish it, hey, keeping up with the next month's work is did I get this work done on time or not? So they have a different percentage if it's on time or not on time. So if it was late, they get a lower, lower percentage. So they can't just do it whenever and get a big pile. So in theory that if, that, if I didn't do that, they could not do this month, not do next month, get their same salary next month, cherry pick and get three months caught up and have a huge check. So we kind of avoided that. But yeah, just calculation is probably the biggest burden, getting it started. And then honestly, the other thing that I've, you know, is getting your team's head wrapped around. You really want them to win. This is not meant to be a negative thing. I don't look at this as a negative. I look at this as I can set my margins, which is good for me. I get them buying into us wanting to grow and find efficiencies. And that was what I, you know, I have to make sure we repeat that over and over and over. It's not just like, hey, get your incentive done so I can make sure that I'm not overpaying you. It's not, that's not why we're doing it. And so that's been over the years, you know, just making sure that we overly communicate the reasoning why we do it. You know, I really am a big believer that everybody should get to win when we grow.

Zooming out kind of the, the industry in general. Accountants. I mean, I had a 40% firm which was not a big firm by any means, but people love to like go to social media with like a five person firm and be like, you know, timekeeping is the devil and, and it's dumb to ever even do it. But you look at like a big four firm and it's like, I don't know the first thing about keeping, they're.

Keeping track of time for a reason.

Yeah, it's, it's the only machine that anybody has ever run successfully. So do you think a version of what you do would make sense in your Deloitte setup?

Yeah, Deloitte would be a lot different. Well, I don't know. It probably would have worked. They wouldn't have got me to buy into working more money without giving me more money. This is where I kind of ran into the wall with them at, at. But I, I did not have, you know, I had a section. And thinking back, I probably did 40, 50 tax returns a year. They were all 40, 50, $60,000 a piece. And so I was probably doing six or 700 grand worth of work a year. And I never even remote. I couldn't even tell you how much the dollars were I was doing. So they never attached dollars to my work. In my mind, I was really on the clock is what I felt like. And I like the mindset of not be on the clock when I think about time for us. I don't remember the last time I looked at, you know, realization or how many billable hours did this person work. I don't look at that at all. I'm trying to make sure my pricing is right. More than anything, I'm trusting my people. It's just a barometer for me to make sure that my pricing's not totally out of whack. What I think the work should take versus the work is taking. It's not a negative to me at all. I just want to know, hey, that work took us eight hours. You know, I really would have thought that that shouldn't have taken us eight hours. What's going on there? And we Find that the client's out of system or they've grown and we haven't adjusted our price or whatever it may be the case. And I, I hope that they realize that because we try to talk about that a lot. But I understand the burden of keeping track of time, the pain in the butt. So the more we can automate that stuff, the better. But the necessary for the data can't be a bad thing.

And do the, you know, you, you get stuck with a quote, bad client or a poorly priced engagement or something like that. The people subject to production pay like they have to feel they have some agency and changing that situation.

Oh, they, I want them to raise their hand immediately go, we have to raise this guy's fee or we need to fire them. One of those things has to happen or we need to reprice this thing right away because we are so far off of what the expectation is. A lot of times we're a little slow to do that though because we, we take the burden of it's our fault. Well, we don't know it well enough yet. Or once we get it cleaned up, it's going to be fine and the client's a train wreck. And so I want them to raise their hand sooner rather than later and going, hey, what we thought, what this was and what this is are not the same thing.

Matt, this is awesome. I feel like I always pick up a bunch of, a bunch of nuggets when we chat.

I mean, I love talking to you too. It's been great.

This, this all kind of started for you with pasba, right? Like that was kind of where you got the first taste of this model.

Yeah, I mean, um, this all started from, you know, PASBA started from an old franchise called Comprehensive Accounting. When that franchise got bought and flipped and went away, all the old franchisees started PASBA and this was one of the old tenants from the 60s or 70s whenever that franchise started. And it's a, what a great community. They have a lot of this stuff figured out a lot of really wise older people in the community. But there's a lot of new blood going in, going, hey, these old things are still really, there's a lot of tried and true in that. We just might need to modernize some tech. But overall it's a great group. I I, it's changed my life and I can't thank PASBA enough for what they've done for me and my family. It's, it's life changing for sure.

I that was always my perception of PAs a very old timey group and then I did some stuff with them.

And it's, it's paper, lot of paper and old. Dude.

Honestly, it's, it's. And it's so. It's easy to dunk on that. But from a systems and a business standpoint, it is still very progressive in a way that more modern firms oftentimes are not.

Yeah, my bet, one of my best friends is Joe Lawson, and his grandfather started comprehensive. And I always think about Mr. Lawson going, oh my gosh, think about how many millionaires you made over the years just with creating a McDonald's for accounting firm, which is great. So there's a lot of really super successful people I look up to in that group. And, you know, there's a lot of really wise people that have made a lot of mistakes. They're willing to share it and tell you what they made mistakes on and what you're doing wrong and not afraid to, you know, tear that band aid off. Or you can go, hey, you're being an idiot. This is why I love that. It's a great, great group to be a part of.

Cool. Yeah. Okay.

What?

Yeah. Down at the Show Notes, we'll have a link to PASBA if you want to learn more about that. And Matt, thanks for coming on.

Anytime. Nice talking.