407 How I’D Run My Accounting Firm on Production Pay

All right, today we're rounding out production pay week. Talked with some really smart accounting firm owners this week about how they've implemented, implemented production pay into their firms. And today I'm going to answer some open questions that folks have had about how to make that work. But I'm also going to share with you how I would do it myself. Am I still a fan? How would I roll this in my own firm? Let's talk about It's Q and A Friday on Jason on Fern. First off, thank you to the very smart people who let us pick their brains this week. I learned a bunch more about it. I found more things that I like about it. Found a bunch more things that I don't like about it, honestly as well. And whether you come out of this week like, yeah, this is the thing for me or not, I think we can all agree we have a much more informed perspective of how this stuff actually works in practice. You always worry about, you know, all of us when we take a stance, we do something a little different. It can be easy to like, rush to the rescue of that and be like, no, this is the only way. But I actually feel like we got some pretty real, like, transparent information this week. Particularly when it's coming from a, a software brand where it's like their platform is built on the notion that, like, that's the right way to do something. It's hard to call that thought leadership. It's definitely telling you how to do something a certain way, but is it free of, like, influence? That's why I like going straight to practitioners, not folks with like, partnerships with other brands. Like, gimme the real answer. A few I thought good questions that we should run through to kind of round out the week. And then I'll, I'll tell you my take on how I would probably make use of this in my firm. Biggest question and maybe tougher thing to get your head around. Brian Claire brought this up on LinkedIn. He said, how do you blend production pay with a pod setup? I am very pro pod setups. Some of the people that we talked with said that they were using it, but really just with more senior types of accountants. The way I run my firm, I just always want there to be this evolution of tasks trickling down from seniors to juniors to admins, because that's lifting those people up in a really accelerated way. And I had the most rewarding thing I think that I did in my firm was taking people on a career path from A to B where I could see where they came in the door. And I could see in just a few years time how they were just in such a fundamentally better place that completely change their career prospects for as long as they work. And I'm a firm believer that that happens the more you can accelerate the flow of tasks through your team. One person's trivial tasks is a great opportunity to upskill somebody else. And I just need that to be embedded in my firm at its core. Which means very intentionally designed pods that have seniors and juniors and admins supporting them. A tremendous amount of support. I come from old cool old school accounting firms where the notion of having an assistant was unthinkable. Like a very hoity toity sort of thing that you would never imagine. I'm like full the other end of the spectrum where not only do I need an assistant, if every member of your team has what is akin to an assistant, then as soon as they get a task that is beneath them, they have somewhere that they can put it. And along the way you're teaching them the skill of delegation which so many of us are blocked on because you don't just get out of bed and learn how to delegate stuff and communicate with another human being, set clear expectations, but by giving them someone who can help, you're upskilling that junior faster and you're teaching the senior the skill of delegation. Matthew Patrick actually jumped in on this thread and shared, said we operate in pods and basically determine the allocation of production based on who is doing that step of the work. And we talked about this on his episode. Basically they have, there's like a manager role, a senior role. I think you kind of have these different hierarchies of folks within a pod. And then the profit allocation he had, I think he had the most common complex profit allocation of any of the people that we talked with. And, and he's, he's been doing it the longest, so that's probably why. But it basically just means at any given level within or hierarchy within a pod, you have to be clear about okay, if you're a junior in a pod, like what is kind of the base expectation of, of what tasks you're supposed to be taking on your mind then goes to like as, as there scenarios where that ends up being unfair to somebody where they're kind of shirking tasks or where somebody in one role say they're the junior and one pod, maybe in one pod they're doing more work than the junior in another pod. I think there is potentially a risk to that. You mitigate it as much as possible. By. By just getting really explicit about, like what the responsibilities are supposed to be of each of those types of folks. But it's definitely something you got to keep your eye on, I think. Another question that came up, actually, I super appreciated Caitlin Minow. I think is how you pronounce it. I thought this was really interesting. It raised a question about ensuring high quality alongside efficiency. She said they moved away from production pay in part because team members were flying through work at the detriment of client relationships and quality. Our QC line of defense, primarily seniors, were getting a fire hose of returns that they had to spend too much time reviewing and were frustrated that we were incentivizing speed. On the other hand, our managers felt the clients who wanted an extra planning phone call or needed an extra bit of attention, we're slowing them down and. And client relationships were sacrificed. So it's a super nuanced conversation. Matthew shared that they. They closely track the work as it goes through the quality control process to see what's getting bounced back and what is high quality work that's coming through. This is a. I mean, maybe production pay makes this worse. This is a really hard problem in. In any growing firm ensuring that the work is being done at a consistent level because the level of service is such a massive spectrum and everybody's normal is different. Honestly, there are people in your firm who will spend so much more time holding a client's hand than somebody else on your firm. And standardizing that is super difficult. But there has to be some threshold at which there is a bar that all work is funneling up through. And that's normally gonna be the quality control process. And you've got like rotating people so the same people aren't reviewing the same work every single time. That needs to be standardized and part of the incentive structure somehow. And who was it? It might have been Craig that told us, or maybe it was Matthew that like, yeah, that factors into the time it takes sending stuff back with notes and having to do rework. It just takes time. And so the fastest way to get something done is to get it done to the level of the quality control process. But then the second thing you have to have is some sort of feedback loop directly from the client to assess their level of satisfaction. Because just as many accountants will over and underserved clients in different ways, clients want different things. So like the definition of overserving or under serving a client from the client's perspective can also be completely different. And this is an important factor in determining, like grading a client is this client good for us or not. Some clients have incredibly high standards and exact a huge volume of work from you where others don't, while commanding the same fees. And so I think it was Craig that told us there was a converse, a separate conversation that happens with the client quarterly just to see how things were going to get feedback from them. I know Brandon Hall's talked about they use NPS surveys. They go out to the client every single month to kind of score what they're doing. I have a mixed relationship with NPS surveys. That's like the one to 10. How are we doing? Because I think in most cases they get ignored because they're not a mandatory part of the process. I think the only way for those numbers to be real is if you somehow have to force every single client to complete it. Like, almost like making it a prerequisite of delivering, of receiving the delivered work. They have to give you that feedback. Otherwise, I think it skews just towards feedback that people want to give and it's not complete data. So the. I don't know that the goal even needs to be that every single client is personally served the exact same way because different clients will have different preferences there. I think what's most important is that there is an independent feedback loop that can't be manipulated by the person that is incentivized to produce more to ensure that that person is happy. And where on the spectrum of happy do they land? Because that's. I mean, that's arguably the most important data point we can have on our client that is, frankly, hard to capture. Where you can look from team member to team member or manager to manager, how happy are their clients? And so how good of a job is that person doing? Managing the client relationship? It is a very hard thing to do, to wear both the hat of overseeing all the technical work getting done while also advocating for the client and being there and making themselves available for them. That's why sometimes you see that role separated to more of a client relationship manager. But I think Caitlin's point is super interesting that there is a version of this where people just start taking shortcuts. And so somehow you have to have controls in place there to ensure that quality control is still maintained to the standard that the firm sets and that client satisfaction is still measured so that if there are any issues, you can get out ahead of them. If you have any members of the team who are cutting corners, that ought to be evident either in one of those two things, either in the quality control or in the satisfaction feedback. That you're getting from clients. This episode is sponsored in part by Live Flow, the folks that give your spreadsheets and your financial dashboards superpowers. Two superpowers that liveflow gives you. One, a button in your Excel and your Google sheets to pull in data from any old client accounting file you have in QBO or Xero. Imagine just having that a button away all the time. Being able to pull that stuff into a spreadsheet. Either a one time poll or an ongoing continuous sale sync. Second superpower they give you is the ability to throw together super quick, as simple or as complex as you want. Finance financial dashboards that your clients will actually use because you can make them more actionable than financial statements and it doesn't require this big old like rigid reporting platform that they then have to go log into or something. You create these dashboards, you share them with a link. Just like with the spreadsheets. It can be a one time data push or it can be an ongoing sync. So the client just keeps going back to that same like super smart stuff. Particularly if your clients aren't making sense of those financial statements because that's not an easy thing for most business owners to do. Learn more about LifeLow. Check out the link down in the show notes. This episode is sponsored in part by Team Up. Hello sir or Madam. I would like to discuss with you an opportunity to use our vast accounting staffing resources with expertise that is vast and world leading, signed every DM that I get on LinkedIn. It is like peak offshoring. Outbound inbound accountants are inundated with everybody and their mom offering some sort of offshore solution for getting accounting work done. If only it were such a nice easy silver bullet, right? Here's the thing, gang. I don't know how to make heads or tails of virtually any of it. But what I do know is that there are two groups that were heavily recommended to me and are the only two groups that I run sponsorships for. And we continue to run sponsorships for them because we're sending a bunch of people to them like it is working. That's why these companies continue to buy ads on my channel. And so very often I run into listeners who use these services and I stop and I say, how was it? Was it good? Was it bad? Tell me everything about it. And we continue to run sponsorships for these groups because they're good, because people are having really good success with them. Team up what they do really, really well. They help you find talented accountants in the Philippines that you work with directly, no middleman, no ongoing fees, no like the way I did it back in the day in my firm, I was actually paying a group and almost half of my monthly payments were going to the group, not going to the individual. If you want to work with these super talented people directly, get on the horn with Team Up. They've got recruiterments on the ground in the Philippines. They'll find you some really good people. Learn more. Check out the link down in the show notes. You know, it's any like weird kind of different strategy. We talk about like scheduled work or production pay. They so much come down to. And Caitlin called this out, she said it's such a nuanced conversation. They so much come down to the, the details of how you get it right. And sometimes that even looks a little different. Team to team and client base to client base. For every good idea, there's a really bad version of it where it's like not implemented right and people hate it and it probably falls apart. And I'll be totally honest with you, this, to me as a practitioner, is the value of really nuanced conversations like we have on this podcast, not the fluff 10,000 foot view that I think you still get from the vast majority of vendor content where they have one accountant in and it's like a rah rah thing, like showing off this cool, impressive thing that the accountant does, but it never really gets beyond surface deep. Like to me this is the value of communities, of meeting other people who do the stuff that you do and have a willingness to have nuanced conversations. Like Matthew Patrick hopped into this LinkedIn thread and answered a whole bunch of really detailed questions, which I really appreciate because they're just there isn't a very high volume still really contextual, high quality conversations, like going to a level of depth where you can actually know. Here's what I've seen other people do, here's where it worked and where it didn't work. And I would just, I would love to see, honestly, I would love to see 10 more podcasts like this one that we do here that really get into like the meaty stuff for a specific type of accounting firm. Because the answer for a bookkeeping firm is different than the answer for a tax firm. If I were starting out creating content for accountants, again, it would have to be through a much more specific lens. I think I kind of have the benefit of being earlier to this and so I've gotten away with it being more general and, you know, my audience is fairly international, actually less than 60% of folks that consume my stuff are in the US which I think is super cool. But like these days you have more people doing things like this. And the best version of this, if you're starting out tomorrow is like for solo tax people or for bookkeeping only firms, like, it's just a much more specific version so that you can have these really nuanced conversations with the big goal of shortening the path to something that works great for your firm. That's, that's kind of the goal at the end of the day is not having to be on this seven year arc or this start stoppers, get halfway into a thing and then pull the plug. Get as much information about it as you can ahead of time and just. And learn from what all the other people have already done wrong. Because nothing that we're doing is so novel that we can't still steal ideas from other people who have done the same. That will save you so much headache. And years of just going down the wrong path like that is the ultimate upside of greater transparency in how everybody works and having these conversations. Last point that I thought was interesting that somebody shared with me over DMs, it was somebody who runs a firm that does production pay. They said the biggest pushback they have seen as they have conversations about this with other firm owners is that firm owners don't think employees will, will react well to that lack of stability and the kind of underlying reasoning there is. The reason that their employees to begin with is because they want that stability. It's contractors and it's firm owners that are willing to take on that risk. The person that messaged me disagrees with this. And they're like, well, that's kind of what I want, is somebody that will be accountable. But it is an interesting argument because I do think we have to be mindful of how team members will react to this. And that probably all comes down to communication. They need to feel like they have control over the process. Like if the rug's pulled and they lose a bunch of clients and there's nothing that they can do, you can see how that that puts them in a bad spot. And that could be a scary possible scenario. And I think you, you also have to show them, like, what's the track record? Like what would have, had we implemented this earlier, what would that have looked like for you? And what are the possible timelines going forward? Like you kind of have to paint that picture for them. Because I do think almost inevitably there will be some trepidation when you put this in front of your team, and that's, that's reasonable because they are like, there's a, there's a, a lot of truth to, to this statement that they're employees because they appreciate that security. And, you know, maybe this is just the version of me talking that is entrepreneurial. And so maybe I was never wired as an employee from the beginning. Maybe that's why this whole idea is attractive to firm owners, because we weren't wired the way that those people were when we were employees. You know how frustrating it was to look to your left, look to your right, and see that you're outperforming the people around you. But the traditional salary mechanics do not reward you fairly. Like, there's just wildly different levels of output that people do inside of accounting firms, and pay is normally not elastic enough to keep up with those variations across different people. And so if you're a high performer, you always end up feeling like you got the short end of the stick, right? Now, many of these people, they learn that and they're like, well, that's why I'm going to be better off going out and doing my own thing, right? So, like, I'm, I'm a high performer. I'm going to go high, perform for myself. So maybe we are just like, projecting on everybody else, like, no, this is a good idea because it is appealing to us. There's another counter argument here that says you run the risk of inspiring a newfound confidence in this independence in your, your team members. Like, what if you really do show them? Like, you show how much money you actually make, which is a big fear for a lot of people, not how much you make, but how much revenue you generate? A lot of folks nervous about doing this with the team. And does it bring your team a step closer to an understanding of what it would look like to do it for themselves? And does that make this a bad idea to give them the confidence that they could go out and do their own thing? That's a tough one. I can actually see that being a fairly reasonable argument. I guess the thing that I always come back to is that whole argument is just a very slippery slope because where do you draw the line of, well, investing in them? This much is too much because I don't want them to get too powerful. Right. Like, you look at that entire spectrum of where you draw that line, there isn't any place on that spectrum that doesn't feel icky, which I think probably means it misses the point. And at least when I was running my firm. I don't feel like I ever got burned on this. Trying to do the best by people knowing that long term it's going to have them turning up to work as the very best versions of themselves, even if it changes that future timeline. I can't be mad at what they are if I'm not willing to invest in them along the trajectory of what I want them to be. And I had people poached from my firm on my reputation. It was cool that they worked for Jason Stats and they could, they could flex that. I had people take jobs. Oh man, I still remember we had a super young guy came in with like no skills. We hired him from working in a warehouse. He, he, I mean he learned so much to his credit and we, we put so much training and effort into that where he became a cloud accounting wizard at a really high level. As honestly any accountant going into a really good cloud accounting firm does. Like, they become so powerful so fast. And he had this guy that, I mean he couldn't have found a job for 50 grand a year. And in three years time he cashed that out for like a controller job in private that paid really, really well. And he's like 23, 24. And there's going to be people that do that for you and it's going to feel like such a kick in the nuts and it's going to be so, so annoying. And that happened. I sat the whole team down and I said, here's the reality of, of, of what's happening right now. You are all learning a tremendous amount. We're pouring a bunch of resources into you. You're growing so fast. We have this approach to moving tasks through people that is ensuring that folks are always growing, iterating through like more valuable work. And it is going to take you on a journey where you become an incredibly valuable person to our clients, but also to a lot of other people out there that need what you can do. And it means inevitably you're going to get phenomenal offers that you could not possibly imagine. I just want you to keep one thing in mind, is what was the position that you were in when you came to this firm and we started making those investments in you and we took you on this journey and we sourced the clients that would be a great fit for you and enable you to grow, recognize you're on a awesome trajectory where you're growing so fast because this is a really cool opportunity and it's not fun every day and it's challenging, but it's making you into A freaking unicorn. And there may be a day where it makes sense to get off that bus. There might come a day to cash that in and take that job. And maybe it's a little less sweaty and maybe it pays a little more than I can pay you, but the right time to get off the bus isn't three years into it, isn't when you're in your 20s. That's the firm that I want to run. Like, that is turning out unbelievably good people, even if it does mean they leave. Even if it does mean that you bestowed enough confidence into them for them to have the audacity to think that they could do this for themselves. What a. What a thing to give somebody. Like, what. That's kind of the ultimate gift, right? And so I think on that spectrum of like, how much do you pour into people and how much do you build them up? I don't think there is a line that can be drawn to say, like, here is the right point. That just doesn't feel gross. This episode is sponsored in part by Cloud Accountant Staffing. Nothing grinds my gears quite like a vendor in the accounting space that knows absolutely nothing about how accountants or accounting firms work. And there are, there are all too many of them. Not all of them. There's a ton of smart people in software and all that, but you definitely know when there's like a sales rep or something that's just tone deaf and doesn't understand what you do. Cloud Accountant Staffing this was their experience trying to offshore, trying to hire talented folks in the Philippines. And so they kind of just started rolling it themselves. Cloud Account Staffing Basically, the founder was an accounting firm owner, had tremendous luck hiring talented people in the Philippines like I did, and eventually just started doing it for some other firms. And it grew and they started, started advertising on my channels and now it is a proper big boy business. And the reason they're crushing it is because they get what it's like to run a firm and how to do this stuff and how to even work those people into your team successfully. Okay. If that's something you're exploring. Learn more about Cloud Accountant staffing. Check out the link down 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. One 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 cross 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, the old show notes. You know what they're called. This is where you get into like compete agreements. I just love the idea of having an actual plan where people can take clients and leave and they pay you for them. Because when you put your finger on somebody and you're like, you can do your own thing and I'm pretty sure you're going to at some point and if this stays adversarial and I pretend you're not going to do that and I don't give you a path out, one day you're going to come and surprise me and it's going to hurt. But what if instead we put together like a 24 month plan and you leave with this collection of clients and I get paid for that and I'll even support you in that process and you know, we can still be helpful to each other. Even when you're running your own firm. That is a vastly better way of letting somebody leave your firm than them surprising you overnight one day. Especially in an age where it's never been easier to build a firm, especially specialized firms. And one of the big things blocking people from specializing is they're afraid they're going to get bored of a specialization. What a problem to have a wildly profitable specialized business where there's a huge market of potential buyers. How's that for a worst case scenario? If you are like bringing up amazing people, there's an off ramp there. Like find a way for them to take some of your clients and get paid for them. But instead we're like making people sign non competes, right? Which I know just seems dumb to me. Okay, production pay, what would I do? Let me just put a big old asterisk on this to say everybody you just heard from this week is more informed than I am on doing production pay because I haven't done it. And so it's very easy for me to sit back and like cherry pick. I like this, I like that reality. I haven't done it. So I like my take on this. Honestly, shouldn't be all that, all that important. But I can tell you having gone through that week kind of where it lands with me, I would definitely do it in a pod structure. Like that's just too foundational to how I want to run my accounting firm. I like what Matthew Pachter talks about where you, you basically define the roles and the responsibilities of each level of hierarchy within a pod and then there's a percentage allocation of production that goes to each of those roles within a pod. If I made a change here, I would potentially reserve production pay to just higher levels of hierarchy within that group. I don't know that I would make it available for everybody. The reason I say that is in my setup where I'm trying to get tasks to be as fluid as possible between people, that happens really fast and really aggressively at the bottom level of a pod with juniors, with admins. One thing we talked about with Matthew is. I know, or maybe it was with Craig I was like, how does, how does this work for my setup? Because I love pulling admins into getting this work done because they almost always end up as something quote unquote more than admin. They almost always then go down the professional path and until I'm willing to give them quote unquote professional tasks, they won't have that self belief to say like, oh yeah, I could become a CPA or EA or whatever it is that they want to do. And I worry if I apply production pay all the way down to the bottom of the skill ladder there, that it restricts the fluidity of how some work could get moved around. I also like the idea of entering into production pay being more aspirational. The notion that once you get to senior, once you get to manager, something like that, then you're on board for. And the reality is my seniors, my managers, all that stuff that's a little more locked down in terms of what the responsibilities are. Well, you're managing the client relationship, you're doing quality control that is very well agreed upon. What needs to happen at that level. Whereas at least in my practice and the way that I ran it under that, it was a little more fluid just because we were just trying to throw at people whatever stuff they could do. And that, that I think was a good thing because it was pushing them to, to do more and to learn more skills. Again, let me just put that giant asterisk on that. To say any deviations that I offer here, it's not coming from a place of having done it. So it's, it's not really fair for me to point my finger at other people who are actually doing it and being like, no, that this, this is wrong. But that's something that I would, I would think about heading into it. And it's not even to say that you couldn't start there or start at even just one level and just say that's it. Like, that's, that's as far as anybody in the firm knows, that's all we're doing. And then down the road, potentially, in fact, it may even be easier to do this in a more bit by bit sort of way down the road. May even you roll that out to additional people. I think I would start at the more senior end of the spectrum. And it's not to say I wouldn't someday take it further than that, but I think I would start there. I'd run it in secret for a while. We heard this from folks like, build that calculation, step one, look at it retroactively to see what that would have meant for people's compensation. And if you're still nervous, just run it behind the scenes, see what that looks like. See, does it go off the rails? Would it have created any issues? If so, rerun how you do that calculation, what the perks are, if there's any bonuses for specific actions that is worth doing before going into no matter what. Not necessarily waiting, but at least going back on the data, doing all that calculation, because it's actually really interesting to see how do behaviors change under that new system? Because they probably will. That's the goal anyways, right? I guess that's kind of the whole point of this thing. So if you like the idea of it, but you're nervous about it, it's honestly just a matter of like spending some time with the spreadsheet. Like that is how you get out from under the fear of doing this also. I mean, if you want to do it, drop a comment under here and be like, hey, anybody else want to like seriously talk about doing this and hop on a zoom call because if, if you got a few buddies that are doing at the same time as you and you can share that experience, that journey, that's actually a way better way to go through a transition like that. Last thought I had was I would, I would probably start on a longer time horizon. I love the idea of monthly. That seems like kind of the holy grail. And they do say with incentive compensation, the closer you can bring the reward to the action, the more real that becomes. But for starters, there's definitely a smoothing effect that happens doing that over a longer time horizon. I think it was, it was Trevor that told us they do it six months at a time. I think I'd probably start there until I could see the stability and have an understanding of what the annual cycle looks like. Because if you are a tax heavy firm, you're going to have some humongous months. Do I want that or not? Similar to starting with production paid just with my more senior folks, I think I'd probably start there and I'm going to learn a whole bunch by doing it right. And that's the real goal is I'm going to know so much more when I then make those subsequent decisions. At that point I'll just be, I'll be better equipped to be able to make those calls. This came up a couple of times this week. This is a great advertisement for pasba. Pasba, we'll put a link to that in the show notes. Both Matthew and Craig are PASBA members. I think they each share that. And PASBA kind of has a secret sauce to how they say you should run your accounting firm and production based pay. And that formula is one of them. And they've been very generous to kind of share how they approach that with us. But I mean if you're looking for a community of folks that are leaning into this pretty hard that exists like they're doing that in pasba. But don't let that stop you from finding your own folks. From posting a note down below asking around, see if anybody wants to go through that journey with you. This was super fun. This was a killer week. Like I said, whether you're super bought in or not, if you made it through this week, I can tell you you're more informed than 98% of accounting firm owners on how this stuff actually works in practice. The level of questions you're going to ask about it are like just vastly higher level, smarter questions. The likelihood of you doing it successfully is much, much higher than somebody that just kind of stumbles into it. And that's a product of showing up, man, and being willing to learn, being open minded. Not everybody is. I posted on Money on social media just like, hey, we're doing a whole week on production pay thing. And there's a lot of people that will scroll by that post and be like, that's impossible. And they will never listen to any of this stuff. They won't stop to educate themselves. Kudos to you for doing that. Whether you like it or whether you end up doing it or not, you made that investment in yourself. That's probably the most important thing that we're doing is being willing to continue investing and our understanding of how to do all this stuff better, man. Fun week. Thanks for coming and hanging. Got any leftover questions from that? Drop that stuff in the comments. Maybe we'll tidy it up next Friday and I'll see you there.