406 Practical Production Pay Advice

Special guest today, the one and only Craig House. He's been on the podcast before. He's a repeat guest, a two time, two timer. I think he's a two timer. Production pay. He's been doing it for, for quite a while.

Got some really interesting insights from this conversation.

He runs a firm of 20, but.

He'S like, man, you can do this all the way down to pretty much your first hire.

So I tried to be the bad guy. I tried to like pick apart, you know, if I'm a, if I'm a.

Punk in this firm, how am I.

Going to game the system and try.

To find all the ways to break it? You know, I'm already convinced like I'm bought in on production pay. But I think the hat I wear in conversations like this is like, okay, but what are the naysayers? Like, what's the counter argument to this? And so we kind of tried to pick apart the ugly stuff. And Craig, to his credit, like, he's not, he's not guessing this up to be anything more than it is. It's not perfect, it's a different game.

But it's, it's better than the game.

Of the 40 hour week and the fixed salary. If you were like me when you came of agent accounting, you knew just how frustrating that was and how it just kind of perpetually shorted the high performers.

So without further ado, enjoy this conversation with Craig.

I think you're going to like it. Gang got Craig House today talking more production pay. Craig, if anyone hasn't had the pleasure of bumping into you into the wild yet, what's the 32nd Craig House intro.

CPA from Dallas just hit 50, so I'm kind of in that boomer stage right now. My wife and I started our CPA firm 10 years ago, actually 11 years ago now. And I've grown it to 20 people, about 4 million in revenue. Got two teen, well, not quite teen. One's a teenager, one's 20, so a couple daughters that keep me busy on the side and kind of a nasty golf habit. Yeah. Looking to help as many accounting firm owners and other business owners as we can with growing the smart way and being able to help, you know, get some peace of mind with their businesses as they, as they go through life.

I won't take the golf bit. I've gotten in trouble talking golf on this podcast before. Some people sat up when he said $4 million firm with, with 20 people. So at least, at least they're listening now. Okay, production pay, I think for folks that haven't done it yet. Oftentimes they'll see people that have kind of a system they're comfortable with. And that is overwhelming. And the better thing to maybe consider is like, where did that start? Like, what's the baby step? How do you first get into that?

So for you, what did that look.

Like in the very beginning? What problems were you trying to solve with that?

Sure. We joined pasba, the Professional association of Small Business Accountants six years ago and you know, really with the intention that, hey, this, these are some long lived accounting firms. We want to be able to grow our firm the right way. And I kept hearing of different firm owners that had recommended it. So we jumped in and one of their core tenants is to pay their accountants and team members on production. And so for me, as a accounting firm owner and somebody who came from the big four, I was Arthur Anderson 30 years ago. You know, being able to hear like, hey, I, I hated working 20 extra hours in a week with really no big change in pay just because that was expected of us. And so being able to put people into a program where they're incentivized and rewarded for doing extra and rewarded for doing it quickly and accurately was really just a win win for both us as a team and then also our team members who are on our, in our firm. And so production pay has been a journey. It's not something you just kind of flip a switch and bam, there comes production pay. But I think as our team has matured and grown over the last few years, implementing it has been huge because it helps us attract team members that normally would not be attractive to a small firm. So for us, it's been a journey of four or five years, but it's slowly turning into a fine wine.

What did that rollout look like? So you presumably were paying folks the traditional way and then had to sit down and have a conversation.

Yeah, you know, everybody by and large is still on what you would call a salary. You know, when they come over, they have a certain pay expectation. And so, you know, there's not this magical, they're not like a salesperson where all of a sudden it's like, oh, I didn't work three weeks, so I didn't get paid this month. We're still paying them, but we've created, you know, through a variety of either, you know, with our CRM, which is count and or some Excel spreadsheets, analysis of who, who's everybody working on, what are they doing for them, what's the revenue? And then being able to allocate it to each of them has been, you know, like I said, a process. To answer your question, a little more direct, directly, we, you know, we've had some headaches, right? You have some people that come over and they're used to making a certain higher salary. They're also used to working maybe 55, 60 hour weeks in taxis and suddenly we're telling them, you don't have to do that, but then here's your pay because of it. So there's been a little bit of a, you know, give and take on both sides where some people that were used to making a higher salary but working more now are getting used to, okay, I may make a little less, but my dollar per hour is better. And we have this with some, some of our team members who are actually have spouses in industry or friends. And they realize, yeah, I made more money, but I work so much more than I did. So it really has been, I think it's the way to go. For professional service firms. It rewards them based on results, not inputs.

If I'm in your shoes, should I care if an employee wants to work 100 hours and their pay scales to.

Support that as long as the work's getting done accurately and timely. Um, we had, you know, we've had that a little bit. That was an issue when we first rolled it out. We had, you know, a couple people who really, you know, kind of want to grab as much as they possibly can. And then, you know, you get into the throes of, you know, year end work, indoor tax season and next thing you know it's like, hey, that's been on your list for a week and a half, two weeks, like, let's get this to somebody else who's got some capacity right now. So there's a little bit of give and take there, but yeah, I mean, if, if somebody's able to do it and the clients love working with them and the work gets done timely, I mean, they could do it. It's just, you know, I mean, as we both know, we've been in this position where we had to work. I haven't, I don't think I've ever done 100 hours in a week. But you know, those 60, 70, 80 hour weeks, they, I mean you can only function as a human in that capacity for so long before just getting burned out.

80S hard, 90 to 100, it gets easier and then it's really past 100 where you find what you're actually made of. Right?

That is true.

That's been My experience, so.

But yeah, that's the beauty of it, right? And we have people that want to go part time. We had one that wanted to go seasonal and it was a very easy transition. Like, okay, that's perfect. Here's what your, you know, expected pay will be if you go seasonally or if you only work two or three days a week. You know, it, it's up to them. It gives them a lot more flexibility than, Well, I don't know how we're going to figure this out. We'll just cut their pay in half. And you know, frankly, our seasonal person, she can do almost as much in a year as some of our full time people because she's just focused January through April and July through October.

So we talked with Matthew a couple of days ago. I assume your setup is everybody's got kind of a base that's more or less what the market is and beyond certain thresholds. They get payout quarterly or something like that.

We're trying to get, we've been doing it every six months, but we're actually, I'm kind of encouraging the team to go to a monthly. And so I built out a spreadsheet that they can track. They can actually kind of do a summary of it each month and compare it to their, you know, salary to see. And if they went over, then they get, then they get a bonus the next month.

I, I love production pay. I feel like my, my job in these conversations is to pick it apart is to be the person that's like, I won't work because of this or that.

Right.

So how do you, how do you.

Avoid, you know, you talked about kind of the Hungry Hungry Hippo problem of hoarding everything you can get.

How do you, or what is the.

Feedback loop to prevent team members from chronically underserving clients because they're taking shortcuts and trying to just get as much out the door as they can.

You know, we, we haven't completely solved for that. We don't, it's not a huge problem, luckily for us. But you know, if it, if it is something where the work is lagging because they're, they're trying to take too much on and we'll just reassign it. So when we sit down in our weekly production huddle, it's, you know, hey, here are the tasks outstanding. And we try to allocate and make sure if somebody's saying, hey, I'm, I'm pretty open this week and we see a couple things lagging, we'll move it if it's a quality standpoint, you know, where we, where we adjust there is, we'll send it back for rework. And frankly, the manager team, there's six of us that manage clients, you know, if we've got somebody that's their quality has dropped off, you know, we'll have a conversation together and then it's a matter of getting them back up to pace. But rework in, in our industry is, is kind of where we measure it because if we got to send it back because the quality's off, they're going to have to spend more time doing it. So it really ended up they're incentivized to do it right the first time, even if it takes an extra, you know, 20 to 30% longer than they would like to, versus having to pull it back, pick it up, do it again, send it back. And then frankly, I mean, if somebody, you know, once again, we're kind of lucky here, but if somebody wasn't performing, then they just kind of, the managers will start allocating it to other people just like in, you know, just like you would see probably even the big firms, right, Everybody kind of has their favorites. The ones who get stuff done, they probably get loaded up more. You know, the ones who probably slack off or not, then, you know, they just all of a sudden will turn around, go. I don't have, as, I don't have as much allocated to me, you know, so I do think it could work even in a big firm versus a small firm.

Well, it's interesting. This week we've seen sort of two different approaches. One, one being firms that hire very senior people, very high output folks. And those folks are just kind of given the independence to run that engagement. And I think that that quality assurance feedback loop is probably a little harder in that situation.

Sure.

Your, your setup, I think where you have more folks involved in the engagement. Like we heard from Matthew, a lot of upsides to that. I also like just having greater diversity in the type of staff you can bring in.

But doesn't that just turn the calculation.

To hell when you've got umpteen different fingers in the engagement? Like, how do you, how do you make that fair?

Well, it's, it's. We do, we do it a percentage for, we allocate based on the accountant or preparer, if it's accounting or tax work, the reviewer, whoever reviews it, and then the manager gets a 10% override on everything. Clients that are under their fiefdom. And to make it fair. Right. You would, you would go through and, you know, they're getting 17%, they know. Then if it's like, hey, this is maybe taking me longer than I think it should for how much we're getting paid on it, they raise their hand a little faster than they would if it was like, hey, I'm getting paid the same weather. It takes me three or four hours. So now if it's taking them four hours and they're saying, hey, this is only an $800 client, you know, and this should only take me three hours, they, you know, they'll speak up and say, this is taking longer because something is holding me back. Right. And we can have those. That. That was something that years ago we would never have had any feedback from because, frankly, they weren't incentivized to do more without the production pay in place. I think the other thing too is I think, you know, some firms in Pasba will use 15%, some use more. We've tried to talk about having a grading program as well, to where not only do I allocate the revenue to them, but I may assign it based on the quality of it and whether me, as a reviewer, had to do kind of fill in some blanks or send it back, things like that. We haven't gotten that far yet. But I think that's the next iteration of it is to have the percentages be slightly different, you know, reward them for actually doing an A plus job. And if it's a C job, then, you know, maybe it's 15% or 16 or something like that. If it's not done timely, you know, knock, knock some off. You know, accountants are great at complicating simple tasks. And, you know, we're trying to avoid over complicating it too much. And that's, you know, we'll see, we'll see as we build it out. If we do, if we go further into it.

And you said if it's the manager that's responsible for the client relationship and scope conversations and all that.

Yeah. So typically they're a cpa. We've got one enrolled agent, but she's not an account manager. She's the one that went seasonal. So it's somebody with credentials that can be on the power of attorneys for the client and put their name on tax returns, things like that. Yeah, they're by and large the ones that are responsible for it. If a staff person's working under them and they say we need to increase the scope and the manager doesn't want to do it, you know, they can obviously come up the chain and go, hey, listen, I've been spending five hours on this and, you know, you know, and I think we need to increase pricing. And for some reason, you know, Craig won't increase the pricing, so they'll go tell on me to Michelle.

Right.

I think our biggest headache, though is, is it still is very manual. And that is the one thing that we've had to spend a lot of time making sure the spreadsheets work and that they're pulling the data from the right systems properly. You know, it would be great. I haven't found one yet. Most of the PASBA firms, I mean, if you talk to, you know, Matt, Patrick and them, they. Right. They're. They're still pulling spreadsheets in. Their people are still preparing some type of, you know, report that they give as a. To show what they've done. We're kind of in that same boat.

Does time factor into your calculation at.

All, or is it strictly just roll when you get paid role for us.

It'S roll based on the pay. I don't look at. We don't. I mean, we have some people that. I always tell people we don't do time tracking. We really don't. I mean, we don't look at it like, I wouldn't look at it and go, oh, we. They spent three hours in this instead of two. Let's build more. Michelle likes to have a few people track it just to kind of see spots and places like that to go. You know, maybe this client is taking longer and let's figure out why. But frankly, if. If they came to me and said, you know, hey, listen, I'm spending way too much time on this, you know, we're having to reduplicate it because the client keeps screwing up. They don't make our, you know, ajes or something, you know, whatever it would be. They know what's causing them to take longer than they.

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You said the fact that you do this is a is an attractive thing to a Certain type of person that you can then pull to a firm. What's the balancing act between. Because we're all, I mean we're all the, we're all the cool kids that left the big firm and didn't want to do the partner out thing to do something different. What's, what's the balancing act between attracting the folks who, you know, wake up in the morning and jump straight into the cold plunge and are ready to do accounting versus like potential downsides of having something that's just uber production focused and, and a team of folks who are all sort of obsessive over that?

Yeah, I, you could, you could build it like a Wolf of Wall street type of scenario, right, where everybody's out for themselves and eat what you kill type of thing. I think, you know, accountants frankly are a little bit more docile in that. So you're probably not running into a bunch of aggressive A type personalities that are going to run each other over. I mean, you actually, you know, you probably, if you went to one of the big firms, you probably could get that between people. You'd have managers scrambling and knocking out people, calling each other's clients, trying to steal them onto their side. But you know, really, you know, back to the attracting the talent. You know, we had two young moms, they're both under 30, they're both were at big firms, E and Y Deloitte that came over and both of them were, it just had that mentality of like, I'm dreading, you know, they just had babies in April. I'm dreading now having to go back with an eight month old that I'm going to have to send a daycare, I'm not going to see him as much. You know, just that type of mentality. And now they can not only have something that they can control, how much they do, the pay is still pretty good because I mean, frankly, I think our pricing is pretty good. I think we've got the right type of clients. There's still obviously some stragglers. You know, we don't really don't have any of the personalities that it's like, you know, everybody. It's not Wolf of Wall street.

Right.

I mean it's not like a New York firm that's going to just have everybody out for themselves.

Is there an org chart that this doesn't work for?

Because there is such an emphasis on production where maybe folks shy away from some administrative stuff that somebody may need to pick up. Like, do you have to think about that? The production versus non Production roles a.

Little more, a little bit. There's every once in a while, like our admin team, we have four admin. They're not on production. Right. They just kind of get stuff done in the background. We've rewarded, we've come up with some rewards for them if they're in the middle of the production fiasco, whether it's filing returns or onboarding clients or things like that to reward them for going above and beyond. Yeah, I think, I think if you have, if your whole production team, well, if there are people on your actual production team that are not in production pay, that will be a headache. I think it needs to be something you do wholly or not. Because frankly, if you've got somebody say we have a manager that, you know, comes over and they're, they don't want production pay, they just want a, you know, nice salary and they'll just get done what they get done. You know, they may be a nice person and get more done than they should, but at the end of the day there's going to be that, well, you know, I'm not dealing with that. I'm going home instead of, you know, hey, I need to get this done because it's, I'm responsible for it. I don't know. Does that answer your question? Because I don't know if that. I don't really have a good answer for that of where it wouldn't work.

I can tell you one thing, I'm.

A bit blocked on. We may have even talked about this before. I just, I had such good luck hiring non accountants and inevitably most of those folks got pulled into, I think what you would consider production and simply having really talented people around like that. That stuff often just happened organically where they would become kind of that right hand person to that professional and they'd start helping with intake or what they did started looking a little more like production. But if you've got these maybe kind of arbitrary divides on, well, this role's, you know, maybe supposed to or not supposed to do this or that. Does that complicate that at all?

I see what you're saying. Yeah, like, yeah, like our billing person, right. She could get pulled into a lot of tasks that she's like, well, isn't that person getting paid to do that? Like, why am I scanning all of her documents now I'm inputting, now she's asking me to input all of her W2s into the, into Lacert. Oh, and now she wants me to, you know, to go and deliver this and do all this stuff and where's my pay there? I think if, if it was something where she was having to work overtime for it, I could see then going, hey, where's a little. What's in it for me? I might as well do this. We actually had one of our admins moved into a bookkeeper role because she was able to show that she could start doing some monthly accounting work. So I think they see that there is some opportunity beyond just, hey, you're going to sit in this desk for the next 20, 30 years and just keep doing the same thing and we'll just give you nice salary increases every year. I think they see that there is opportunity because frankly, yeah, I mean, everybody had to start out somewhere. When I was 22 and graduated from Marquette and went to Arthur Andersen, I knew probably less about doing a tax return than our admin who does billing, right. He could do a tax return better than 22 year old Craig. So clearly, as long as you have the right mindset that you want to grow, that you want to develop your skill set beyond where you are today, I mean, it's, it's available. It's not something we're going to turn off. It's, it's a little bit harder to get a designation of some sort if they're not willing to go do it.

I'm just thinking of how I'd try to game this. If I'm a preparer, maybe we need like an undercover boss type situation here. But if it's, if it's me, I mean, I'm. You said, you said, well, what if they're asking the admins to come and enter all these W2s. Is that a bad thing?

I. Not as long as the person who's, you know, then getting paid to do it is, is not slacking off. Right. I mean, I think, I think if, you know, and we've seen this before, right? You've. Or not, maybe not internally, but you've seen it. You've heard people talk about where like, yeah, they, you know, like attorneys, right. They offload everything on the paralegal and then the attorney's out playing golf, you know, half the week. The paralegal at some point is going to go, hey, time out. You know, I'm sick of doing their work. They're going to talk to somebody or they're going to leave. Right. So I think it's our job to incentivize the system to not have it to where anybody feels like they're getting taken advantage of. And then also, like you, like I said a little bit before, but you kind of hinted at, right, you, you reward them if they do start pulling their weight a little more than they are expected to.

The distribution of projects. A couple questions on that. Every firm, let's be real, every firm's got the juicy. The juicy projects that have just got.

A nice little bit baked into that.

One for whatever reason. How do you fight it out over projects like that? Like, how does, I don't know, fairness factor into how that stuff gets distributed?

You know, we haven't really had an issue where anybody's raised their hand and go, hey, how come they get all the good stuff? And I don't, you know, we all, I don't know, we don't really actually look into it too much, frankly. It goes back to if they're able to handle the work, they get assigned more work. If they are lagging a little bit, they'll have stuff pulled back, you know. But, yeah, you're right. There are some clients that are probably a little. There's always a few clients that are underpriced. And yeah, there's some clients who are like, yeah, they've, you know, they were paying us $5,000 and now things are a little more simple. But they, they're still paying us, you know, 5% increases each year on that 5,000. This is turning into a nice project. It's like, okay, well, that's kind of win, win. I think most of our team, they all have a little bit of a mix of those. And then back to one of the huge benefits of it. The ones that are the kind of narrower bang for your buck, they will inevitably have the, that preparer accountant will raise their hand and go, hey, we need to do a fee increase for this one.

That, yeah, that direction totally makes sense when you pull somebody new in. Presumably it's not until a ways down the road that they're ever going to cross that threshold where they're actually getting incentive pay. But are you then having to go to other people that could potentially be in the green and say, hey, I got to take this or that project from you?

Yeah, but it really comes down to like. And so this is relevant because it's happening right now, right? We had, we hired somebody September of 23, April of 24, September 24, and December 24. The September 23 is now, this is the year where it's like, hey, you're, you're up to speed now. Like, this is your expectation. But we've been able to kind of grow into those or we've had like, we had a couple people retire. We've had, you know, we had somebody leave. We had a bookkeeper leave January of last year. So we had to allocate out her work. So, you know, I think just general attrition somewhat takes care of that. And frankly, you know, if I end up paying a little bit more for somebody for a year, year and a half, two years in, because a, I haven't grown the revenue enough to, to fill them up, then that's on me. But I'm not going to, I'm not going to go to somebody like, you know, I'll pick on Josh, right, who started in a year and a half ago and go, hey, sorry, you know, I haven't brought in enough revenue to get you full. So sorry, I'm going to cut your payment payback. I mean, that's on me. But if somebody maybe after a couple years starts going, hey, I only, I'm going to only work 40 hours or I want to go part time, you start pulling back from there. They're, you know, you can, you can manipulate it a little bit. But yeah, we haven't luckily. I mean, it's on us to get them up to speed as quickly as possible through marketing and sales.

Is there anything above the manager role? Is it, is it just you or is there anything that exists outside of that production things besides the admin roles?

Well, Michelle and I really are, you know, roughly, I'd say a quarter to half in production.

Really.

We, you know, we have a wealth management practice, so I spend more than half my time on the wealth management side and then with a key, a couple key, really large family relationships. On a strategy side, Michelle's a little bit more in the weeds, but, you know, she's probably 15 to 20 hours a week of production. But we're the two owners, so I mean, frankly, at the end of the day, the buck stops in our office. We get paid a little bit of production, but at the end of the day, I don't want to be in production. So there's not this, like, I'm just going to go start grabbing stuff so I don't have to pay people more. You know, frankly, once again, we just hired somebody in December. I'd rather fill her up and play more golf.

Do you have team members getting into the wealth management stuff at all or are you, are you just handling that for now?

Yeah, we have five people. One of our other account managers, he's a CPA and a cfp. So he's, he works he does actually all of our portfolio management and financial plans. And then we've got a couple on the admin team that also will fill in. And then the two new CPAs that started, you know, they're, you know, at some point we may bring them in to do some more work. Really, we don't have a huge like, oh, we're going to start pulling people out of this tax side. But frankly, five years from now, I think the bulk of our business will be more of the advisory, whether it's wealth management or just tax planning and just general advisory for those clients. And so I really want everybody to be able to learn how financial planning even works so that they can have a conversation with a client. Because frankly, our clients come to us because they don't know how to do stuff. I need long term care or I don't have a will, you know. And even as a cpa, if you're just a tax only, they still ask you those questions and want a referral. So right now there's only five of us. We're all kind of hovering on both sides of the business though. There's nobody specifically that just does the.

Wealth management, does that complicate production pay stuff or are folks hesitant to split time because it could take away from that other production role?

No, once again, the only one who is in production that's on both sides of the fence, he's an account manager. He gets, we allocate the revenue from the wealth management side as well as if he's the preparer and reviewer. So he's actually makes, you know, it's actually more profitable for him to be over on that side probably than the CPA side.

Yeah. Otherwise you could see people wanting to steer clear of it maybe.

It's actually very, I think it's really good for the wealth management side though too to have them have a little bit bigger piece of the pie for the wealth management revenue versus just once again, I was at a firm, you know, after Anderson, there was a pretty large RIA and we just got salaries whether we worked on this many clients or that many, you know, higher or lower amount of clients. And so it incentivizes him to go, hey, wait a second, this is great that we're growing. This is going to help me out personally. So once again, if he gets to the point where he's full, then it's, we can have that discussion of adding more people in that to help.

This episode is sponsored in part by Ignition. Come, come, come, come, come. Here's the thing here's the thing about client billing. You can't bill for the time you spend billing. You can't, you can't. It is pure waste. And we're bad at billing because it's, it's icky. You let things slide, you don't get paid. You waste time. Waste time chasing people for money. That's not what I did.

I would just, I didn't want to waste time chasing them and so I would just. I just eat it.

Don't do that. This is where Ignition comes in. The leading revenue generation platform for accounts and professional services. When I was running my firm, Ignition wiped out our ar, it's true. And significantly reduced the time spent in billing clients, saving our partners over a thousand hours in the first year because they didn't have to bill all that stuff manually. Man. With Ignition, we won more business with impressive online proposals. No more hustling. Hustling PDFs and Word docs. We automatically pull payment up front or at the end of a job when it was done. No more dialing for dollars. We transitioned our firm to more recurring revenue and better managed scope creep. No more leaving money on the table. Ignition is making thousands of firms more money and genuinely made us more profitable. Check out why over 7,000 of the smartest businesses run on ignition@ignitionapp.com put a link in the show notes gang. This episode is sponsored in part by Carbon, the practice management system. I'll tell you one thing I like that Carbon does is they tell you what they're building. In fact, at the end of the year, they announced like, here's all the stuff we're really cranking off for 2025. Let me run you through some of them. 1. Carbon for clients. A vastly upgraded portal experience. Thank you. That is so important.

Custom branding.

This is. There is such a long list here. Let's just say a vastly better client portal experience engagements, nice proposals, agreements, automatic.

Billing, which they already have. They already have some automatic billing, but I think they're just beefing up proposals and engagements.

Google Drive integration, SharePoint integration, Quick Replies, suggested short replies to emails.

Oh, now in beta.

Yeah, buddy, that's got to.

I think that's AI email refiner. Okay, more AI email stuff. I like it.

Client segments, E Signature with KBA API.

Enhancements, new reporting dashboards.

Can I, Can I pick what I'm most excited about? Probably the client.

The upgraded client portal. And there are improvements to the email experience.

Email, so, so time consuming.

If there's one thing that Carbon absolutely crushes, I think still does better than anybody else. It is the email experience and we.

Spend so much time on email, so that matters. Okay. Learn more about Carbon. Check out the link down in the. In the old show notes. You know, what they're called is wealth.

Management, the easy money that accountants like to think it is.

You play a lot of golf?

Is it everything it's cracked up to be?

Yes, it would be the easy, simple answer. It really, I mean, you know, frankly, it's because the financial advisors have convinced everyone in the world that a 1% fee on their assets is good, which is now getting to the point with technology, I mean, before you'd have to hand do everything, trades, all this stuff. I mean, literally with technology you can do so much stuff faster. So it really is becoming a, you know, and versus. So they're competing at a higher level of pay per hour. The accountants compete at a lower level pay per hour and frankly will convince themselves they should go cheaper to get more clients. And so, yeah, it really does. I mean, there is just a huge spread there in terms of bang for your buck on wealth management revenue. I think that's going to change, though. We are actively, you know, this is going to sound silly. It's almost like we're shooting ourselves in the foot by doing it. We're actively trying to get clients into a model where they're not. They're paying more of a planning fee that's fixed based on the services provided. And then if they have investments with us, it'd be, you know, smaller AUM, like 20 basis points or something. I think that helps align them. I actually, you know, back to that, I think accountant mentality. I can go undercut some of these big boys to get, you know, some better accounts. But at the same time, we're still very. It's still decent, you know, revenue for the amount of services. But it is, it is the. Yeah, it's the golden calf.

That's really interesting. Okay, last question for you. On, on production pay, you said you've got a team of 20 now.

Yep, 19. 19 plus a seasonal.

Is there a size that's too small.

For it and a size that's too big for it?

I think no on the small because I think, yeah, I mean, if you have two or three people, everybody would feel like this is great. We're all in the same boat. Big. I can see where it, if, if the software cannot produce the reports the right way. Yeah, you could get it to where it's so big and nobody could manage it to where, you know, it would have to really break everything down into smaller teams. We're seeing that a little bit. I mean, that's been a pain point of making sure this works for 20 people. I think if, if you just wanted to go implement it at a 50 person firm, it take, it takes some effort, but I think it would be worth it. You know, I think if you, if you encourage and you delegate to the managers to manage their clients and the revenue and who they're allocating, you can break it down into those small segments and make it work.

I meant to ask you this before we started. Anything you want to promote, anything we can plug for you or I've selfishly.

Promoted myself the whole time. Right. I mean, wealth management, planning, how much better we are than big firms. But no, I mean, yeah, I think, you know, as a, I like, I just, I see the headaches that accountants have in our industry and just, you know, you follow me on Twitter, it's always driving me nuts. Like they will literally just like, you know, throw themselves in front of a bus to go, hey, I saved everybody, right? I just, I mean, and it's great. And that's why people love accountants, you know, because they will go above and beyond to help, you know, But I do think, I think people need to realize there's a lot more they could be doing with their, you know, and it's really better for the client too, if you don't underprice yourself and overwork yourself. So. But I mean, obviously the shameful plug for pasba. I think pasba's been a game changer for us. I get dragged on Twitter for that too because they think I'm, you know, making money on the side. It's a non profit. I don't get anything for it. But I've just seen some of the firm, you know, Matt Patrick and you know, Tyler Thompson and some of them that I'm like, wow, this is amazing what they're doing. I want to be like them and, you know, hopefully we can pay it forward then.

Craig, we were like 90 seconds into this podcast and you brought up Pasba. How much do they pay you for all the people you're sending to them?

How I. The benefit I get, but it's only because I'm on the board. I think I get a little bit nicer hotel room at the conferences.

Oh, right.

I still pay for it somehow, but I always get the, I get a little bit nicer upgrade. What do you mean?

How is it nicer if you're still paying for it?

Well, it's, you know, I get, like, you know, they give. They give me, like, an extra pillow or something. Okay, maybe on a different floor, right? Yeah, no, I wish. I wish I got paid for stuff like that, but. No, it's. I just think, like I said, I mean, I think you need to find a community of peers that you can go, hey, we're all in the same boat. How are we going to make each other better and go from there?

Okay. People want to find you online. You're just going to be shouting, shouting at people on Twitter. LinkedIn. Where do they find you?

Well, I mean, I do have a LinkedIn page. I mean, if you want to look my name up. I don't really do any posting on there. Yeah, Twitter is kind of where I do stuff. CPA Tax Team, you know, and I try to help as much as I can. My family keeps sending me stuff on Instagram, but I. I only go and look for golf pictures and Instagram, so.

Okay.

And I haven't figured out YouTube or any of these other fancy.

We'll get you there. We'll get to there.

Maybe. I got to figure out how to be comfortable on camera more.

It's just being okay looking stupid for.

A really long time. That's the secret. Okay.

I do that on my own, so, I mean, I guess. Yeah, I just got to turn the camera on and look stupid.

Yeah.

There you go.

Well, cool. Craig, thank you for doing this.

Thank you. Appreciate it.