413 Should You Target Cheap Clients who are Easy To Serve?

This turned into a raging debate online. Would you rather take in one big client? Pick a dollar amount, doesn't really matter. But would you rather take in one big sweaty client that's maybe a little tricky or pushing the boundaries of what you're capable of to serve? Or take on 10 clients that are like right in the pocket, right in your sweet spot, you can do that stuff in your sleep. Which would you rather do? Man, do people have strong opinions on both sides of this spectrum. So I want to go through some of that conversation because I do think there's actually really valuable things to take from the insights that folks shared. But then can we distill that to a framework of like, what is the correct approach for everyone? I have a proposal here. I think I've got a framing of this that is as close as we can get to like a true answer to how you should navigate like both ends of this barbell as you add new clients to your firm. Buddy, let's do it. Let's talk about it. Come on in. So I put up a poll in a couple of places. LinkedIn and, and Twitter got over 2,000 votes. Well over a hundred comments, just a lot of discussion. The gist of it was would you Rather take on 10 simple to serve $500 a month clients or one big lift $5,000 a month client? So if you do the quick math there, the money is the same. But would you rather do it with 10 clients or with one client and the polls? Interestingly, Twitter skewed small client, LinkedIn skewed big client. So let's just say it's down the middle because you had people that jumped into the conversation that were like very opinionated that one end or the other was right. But as you dig into those, as with all things, context matters. So stick into some of these responses and, and call out that specific context because as you are getting to like, well, what's the right answer for me? Depends on how this context applies to you. What stage of the firm running journey are you at? Like that all matters. So some of the responses, just to call this out straight off the top, Lily Tran called out, it depends. No amount of money is worth it when you're dealing with a piece of p. I. T A client that is pain in thine heiny. And let's, let's level set on that. If the people are jerks, if they're annoying, something like that. Oftentimes people conflate higher paying or more complex clients with being jerk bags or hoity toity or Something like that. Let's just level set people that are just jerks. Like, no, like they don't, they don't get on the client list to begin with. And there is no fair version generalizing people at either end of the spectrum. In fact, you find when you get into this, people have wildly different experiences with clients at the bottom end of that spectrum and the top. And it's actually our bias of the clients that we've had to date that might possibly be standing in the way of a better approach for you. So straight off the top, like if they're jerks, no, they don't. They don't get on the client list. So we're not really factoring that into this conversation now. Two comments, literally back to. Back to each other. First person says, easier to keep one person happy than 10. So that's an argument for the bigger engagements. Very next comment. Concentration risk makes this an easy answer. So the risk of having a whole bunch of revenue tied up into a small number of clients when one of them leaves, it hurts more. Right? But you could see somebody who is at a state right now and so much of our appetite is just swayed by how do I feel in the moment emotionally. You can see how somebody who has been burned on relationship management or feels overwhelmed with having to manage too many people, they're going to answer this in a way that's like, boy. Which it would be nice if I had fewer clients. Like if you have 80 messages in your inbox and you're like, I don't know how I'm ever going to keep up with all of these people, your frame of mind right now is like, hm, wouldn't it be nice if I did have fewer bigger paying clients? But if you are like me two days later when you're caught up on that inbox and you roll out of bed, you're like, you're like whistling, drinking that morning coffee, you're feeling good, you're like, no, I can do anything. And your answer would probably be completely different. A few other comments here, one from Greg o'. Brien. My mind has shifted over time. After having a 20, $25,000 a month client, I'll never go back. I'll take the 10 small ones all day long. Bilal Mahana shared. We have few clients at a $5,000 a month rate that I barely touch. But the clients at a thousand dollar a month bother me the most. It's not always the same. Mohamed Yousef I worked with both types of clients. The amount of year round support needed by one large client is much more manageable than 10 small clients. Also, the quality of work we do for a large client is much better. So we can increase prices and we don't get a lot of pushback compared to smaller clients. And then tangentially related from Brandon Hall. We have some clients who earn over a million a year and are pushy, rude, and they seem like everything's an inconvenience. We also have clients who earn over 5 million a year and are humble, collaborative, and patient. Remember, there's always a bigger fish. And so those are a bunch of people pretty much saying the exact same thing about either ends of the spectrum. And the idea that someone would say that about both the bigger client and the small client, in my mind, it points to just acknowledging that reality, that we're probably all heavily biased on this according to the clients that we've had. And maybe the more experience you've had and the more of these you've done, maybe the, the closer you are to, I don't know, the quote, unquote, right answer. But it's worth acknowledging all of us, as soon as we start thinking down that path of would that next project worth be worthwhile? What we immediately do is, is in our head. The brain goes through the old Rolodex of like, what's the most similar thing I've had to this in the past? Did I like that? Do I want to do more of that? But that pattern recognition that our brains do, so naturally, sometimes it can get in the way, particularly if it's a really small sample set. It's, it's funny, like in, in some areas of our life, we're very careful not to generalize as, as we probably shouldn't be. But in other areas of our life, we will immediately generalize. And these numbers are completely arbitrary, picked out of thin air, $5,000 versus $500. And a lot of the commentary was, was targeted at what a 5,000 or a $500 engagement means to that person in their firm at that stage. And the price really doesn't matter. But it can be really easy to generalize in a firm like, you know, working with a specific industry niche. You pick up a few of those people, maybe they're complete jerks. You have a couple clients who make more money than some of your other clients, and maybe they both just turned out to be total tools. And you're like, well, I don't want to work with people that make over X amount of money. Something about it being like a business context, I think makes it feel easier to generalize when it's like we probably shouldn't generalize any of these people for the same reason that you don't generalize like a person that you're about to hire or a friend that you're going to make, you know, out and about. Something like that. So there were a bunch of examples of folks sharing stories at all ends of the spectrum that I would say are a product of, of personal bias, which I mean it's kind of unavoidable. Like we, like we all have those things. We see the world through what we've done so far. This I thought was interesting. Kind of two ends of the spectrum here. One from Erin Andrews. She said, I've done both. The smaller client is much more scalable and the majority of the work can be passed down to the lowest skilled person on your team. If your goal is to get out of the technical work, then taking on super technical clients is not the way to do it. Also, if a $500 a month client leaves, it's a lot less painful than a $5,000 a month client. Leaving just my experience over the past almost two decades. Okay, Aaron, Flex. Just my experience over two decades. No need to experience Flex K. On the flip side, Bruce Phillips, founder of Aprio, he's doing other stuff now, but that firm turned out pretty big. So this is interesting to me. Like what does a, a big firm person say? Well, they'd say what you would expect. He said 5,000 bucks a month till the cows come home. Go big or go home. Always can't make money or scale and eventually service and customer satisfaction will suffer. If you Keep taking on 500amonth clients while attempting to grow, it could be different. If you are a lifestyle business though, that's good context. Like what do you want out of this? Bruce is like fully at the crazy scale end of the spectrum the way that he is wired. But it's something where when you're thinking about like, well, what makes sense for me, I can tell you as I have grown old and, and sage in my own wisdom, a lot of that has come down to learning about me and the things that I prefer and have a better understanding of myself. To be able to see two different answers and be like, I see myself in that answer more than I see myself in that other answer. Or when you, when you hear some advice from somebody, say on the stage, at a convention or at a conference and this person is like, you know, you look at the CV and all the things that they have done and they give you advice, you may look at that person and realize I I don't want to be that person. I see what they've done and it's all very impressive. But would I enjoy that? If the answer is no, then they may not be the best person to take advice from. Context matters so much, and as an increasing percentage of our conversations are happening in zero context spaces on social media where there's no stakes in that interaction, it's very easy for folks to come in and just make blanket statements which, which we actually, I mean, our worldview is so limited. The tunnel vision of that is a product of our, our lived experiences. It makes everything feel like these universal truths. When it's like no, like that's, that's your truth and it's a product of the things that you've gone through, but it's probably not a universal thing for everybody. Compound that with how it's just easy to be hyperbolic online because people are trying to make a point and all just feels very over the top. This episode is sponsored in part by liveflow, the folks that give your spreadsheets and your financial dashboards superpowers. Two superpowers that Live Flow 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 Cubio 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 like continuous 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 link. 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 okay, this podcast today is brought to you in part by the fine folks at Team up who help you find uber talented accountants in the Philippines. I got a little report that I get from the squad at Team up of what they've been up to the last few weeks and the greatest Litmus test of is this thing actually working? Are people actually using it? Is just that are other accounting firms, are they doing it? But also, are they coming back and doing it over and over again like I did? I made my first hire in the Philippines, kind of being like, is this a thing? And man, we. We came back so fast, ended up making three more hires in rapid succession. Team up right now. Whoa, let me look at this. Are you kidding me? They've got 27 active projects right now. About half of them are with returning firms for everything from bookkeepers to senior accountants to tax accounts, Senior tax accountants, executive assistants, gang. It's happening. And the reason why people keep coming back is because it works. Because the first one works. And they're like, oh, okay. This is actually a way to get a whole bunch of work done because it's so much easier to find Accounting town the First Philippines right now than it is to find it onshore. Bunch of firms I know personally work with. Team Up. Team Up's approaches is to connect you directly with accountants. There's not a middleman taking a bunch of money out of that duffel bag of cash you send each month. That's not how it works, but you know what I mean. There's nobody else taking fees out of that. The money goes straight to the person you're working with. Basically just recruiters. They're finding you really good, really good accounts to use. That's it. To learn more about Team up, check out the link down in the show notes. Can I and can I. Actually, I think there is a better solution or a. An example of how to better navigate. This is going to sound like a plug. It's not a plug. Something that we do in my accountant community realize is basically a peer networking community for firm owners. Because the most important thing I ever got was to be able to make friends with other firm owners. And that just totally changed my life. We have the same problem inside of that community of 500 firm owners as you have on social media to a lesser degree. Like, like, there's already a filter there of, like, the people who follow my stuff have kind of a shared view of running a firm. But still, if somebody posts some advice in there for you in a response to maybe something that you posted, and they just say, here's the answer. X, Y, Z. And I don't yet know that person. I want to know where are they coming from with this? Is this a big firm? Is this a small firm? Do they do tax? Do they do bookkeeping? Like maybe even what systems they use. I would love to have that context to know that here's the answer, according to someone in this situation, and you know, what we started doing in the community is we now have a collection of what are called flare, basically emojis after your name that indicates the size of your firm, the service mix of your firm. Do you do taxi bookkeeping, VCF or whatever, what practice management system you use? So John Smith can post a reply and I can see John Smith's reply, but then right next to his name, see the context of what he does, who he does it for, how big that firm is. And, and that just enriches what you can extract from a comment in a completely different way. And we've talked about, is there a way that we could replicate this on broader social media platforms? Like, is there a way that. And, and we could do this. But like, for example, maybe it is a, a profile picture generator where you upload a copy of your profile picture as it currently is, and then we somehow augment that profile picture with like some visual identifiers that people then, you know, immediately associate with. Okay, this is a tax only firm. Okay, this is a firm between 1 and 3 million a year in revenue. Is there something like that where, because every social media platform has profile pictures, we could somehow build in that context wherever people are having these conversations? Because the context matters so much and it genuinely, like I can see inside of realize it genuinely, genuinely makes a difference no matter what end of the spectrum you're on. If you run a bigger firm, I mean, it's very common, you know, somebody running a $5 million firm will like, yeah, I see all this advice, but my issue with communities and social media and all that is like, is that all these people are running firms smaller than me. So it doesn't apply to me. Maybe that's real, maybe that's not same thing. On the other end of the spectrum, you have side hustlers and solo firm, like new solo firm operators who have imposter syndrome. And they're like, man, I can't even get around my head around running my own business. And people give me this advice and it's like you have a team of 15. But that doesn't apply to me right now. Meant to have all that context where you can have that conversation matters so much. If you have any genius ideas on how to effectively communicate this on say LinkedIn or Twitter, that sort of thing, I think, just think that would be such an upgrade to how we interact with folks online. Few more things that people Shared here in the in the comments Terry Cicero Bless your heart. You get stronger by lifting heavier weight, it's true. But the fact that progressive overload gives you bigger muscles, that association, I don't know that the same rules of the universe, the biology of the human body and all, I, I and I don't know that that a hundred percent transfers to like the biology of an accounting firm. You know, Dan Schmidt said 5K, but that's because I find complexity to be more fun. Valid models exist for both. Great thing to know about yourself. Do you enjoy figuring out the new thing and like fumbling through that thing for the first time? If you do, then the bigger, harder projects may be worth worth it for you. Logan Alec who I know, who I know listens Shared I don't care either way as long as I don't have to deal with them. So if you're at a phase where you're trying to get out of doing the technical work yourself, that absolutely changes your answer. Small town CPA said 10 basic ones. I can push most of that work down and just review it versus having to be the acting accountant for all steps. So are you at a stage where you're trying to work on the firm or are you at a stage where you're like man, I'm, I'm still early on but I'm getting like peanuts for my engagements and I need to get paid better for this stuff. The answer for that person may be doing more technical work, but the answer for the person trying to get out of the technical work, that's, that's going to be very different. Right? Okay, two more comments I wanted to share and then we will get to my unified theory for the universe and everything. First one Craig House, who we've had on the podcast several times, he says 10 flapjack clients all day for our team, easily scalable and doesn't require one ounce of work for me to complete. He said if you're a sole practitioner, then the bigger client would be easier. There's an abundance of pancake analogies here. I don't know if there's a concept that exclusively comes from pasba, but there's this notion of like it's like flipping pancakes. Like it's easy for you. You can do that stuff till the end of time. Rebecca Driscoll shared one big client will have high expectations and it will be high responsibility and possibly require higher level support. And if they leave, it hurts more. Ten flapjacks Back to the pancakes are low stress, low responsibility, easier to train others to do and doesn't hurt as much if one leaves. My friends in accounting, listeners of the Jason Non Firms podcast, formerly known as Jason Daly, I propose to you the progressive flapjack methodology. TM okay, here I have a four point methodology for navigating this quandary. Number one, acknowledge that your firm in its current form has a sweet spot, has a pocket like the movie Hitch. Kevin James when you're dancing, you got to stay in the pocket. Don't get weird, like stay within what is comfortable and what you're capable of. Your firm similarly has a sweet spot. And that sweet spot is reflective of your capabilities and the capabilities of, of your team. And so these are the projects that you've got a whole bunch of other examples of that you can do in your sleep, right? That is today your sweet spot. Anything that is, you know, a standard deviation away from what that sweet spot is, it's going to be a lot of work. It's going to be probably pretty inefficient because you're figuring some of that stuff out for the first time. But I think we can all agree every one of us has examples of those things we've done in the past that became the new normal where figuring out that hard thing actually ended up being super worthwhile and unlocked something significant for your firm. In fact, I'll even call out Craig and Rebecca, the last two people we heard from, who I believe, I believe both of them, for example, made a big move away from doing, you know, like once a year tax work. Like they moved to a model of like, we're doing this, this recurring month over month stuff. They shed a lot of stuff that were, I would argue, pancakes 1.0. There was a time in the firm running journey when that was your sweet spot. That was what you started with. Hence the progressive flapjack methodology. But at any given point in time in your firm running journey, your firm, it has a sweet spot. And let's be realistic about what that sweet spot is and especially mindful of any clients you're bringing in that don't land inside of it. You have to have a really good reason to do that. And a fee order of magnitude of 10, going from a $500 client to a $5,000 client, a fee, a, a order of magnitude of 10, that is a wildly different engagement with wildly different expectations. If your sweet spot right now is $500 a month clients, and if you think about how, how big that sweet spot can be, maybe that goes up to, you know, 1500amonth clients or something like that, know that 5000 for you today is probably too big of a reach, that's probably too far outside the sweet spot to be the sort of thing that you can do in a really like turnkey way. Now if you're the big boss and if you're still, or if you're still doing most of the work and you want to be positioned in a different place entirely, you can't get there without doing it. And this is kind of the Bruce Phillips point is like all day, every day, I'm going to take the big thing because that's going to help me get to scale. And I will say an upside that's really hard to measure of being wired this way is to me, the $5,000 project actually isn't about the $5,000 project at all. The $5,000 project. The real value of it is that it just got you access to the $15,000 project. So we are all, we're all just looking at the next hill and as we go through life and we do the kind of the ROI calculation and our decision making framework is just fixated on that next hill. And too often what that hill actually enables is actually a view of the next hill that you can't see or you can't imagine right now. And that's like an even better view place to be, right? And so this, this to me is the strongest argument for the $5,000 engagement is. Well, it's not just the $5,000 engagement, it's that you actually don't know. It's on the other side of that. This episode is sponsored in part by cloud accountant staffing. Do you ever wonder why offshore staffing agencies sponsor so much of my content? Because I'll be honest, it's not cheap. Like, let me just do some like mental math here for you. Most of the brands, like software companies sponsoring my content these days, like, they're pretty kind of the bigger platforms because, like, it's not the cheapest thing anymore. And so how can these little offshore staffing groups afford to advertise and advertise on my platforms for years? I'll tell you how. Because it's working. Not like the ads converting. I mean, the ads are converting, but firms are going to these groups and they're having fantastic luck and they're going back again and again, again and again. Cloud account staffing story. They were an accounting firm that started hiring accountants in the Philippines, had fantastic luck with it, and then like just started doing it for some other firms. And it is one of the fastest growing trends in running small accounting firms right now is the world's just getting smaller. You know how hard it is to find, like really talented onshore accountants. For me, the last four hires that I made in my firm were all in the Philippines. If you want to work with a group that feels like an accounting firm, that's gonna help you find people. Cause that was truly cloud accountant staffing's origin story, it's worth checking them out. Linked Cas down in the show notes. 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. Cause it's, it's icky. You let things slide. You don't get bill 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 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 the condition. We won more business with impressive online proposals. No more hustling, hustle and PDFs and Word docs. We automatically pulled 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 over 7,000 of the smart, smartest businesses run on ignition@ignitionapp.com. i'll put a link in the show notes now. You know, when I was running my firm, a team of 40, I was totally out of the client work by the end. I had less of an appetite to take flyers on weird projects at that point than I did or than I would have, you know, if I was running my own shop. Because at that point, I was out of the client work. And I've ever brought in something super crazy complex and I just dropped it on my team. And even if I was capable of doing it myself, there wasn't a great. There wasn't a high likelihood that the client would have a good experience like with my team just sort of muddling through that. Also not a very good chance that we would make any money doing that. And I shared a few weeks ago the story of the biggest client that I ever landed, which was like an over $1 million engagement, and how that was really good for our firm in some ways and really bad for our firm in other ways. It was an entrance into a new category that had a massive need, and we learned a ton by doing it. And in the end, the project was very, very profitable. But it was a big step. It was, it was an outlier relative to our normal engagements. I would say at that point, it was outside of our sweet spot. Okay, second thought, in my methodology here, we also have to recognize that all things, this is in my mind, a force of the professional services universe. All things are in a race to the bottom, which means that that sweet spot can't be static, it can't be stationary. Now more than ever with tech and all that, the work that we're doing right now, the work we're doing today, will be trivialized big years from now. In fact, we've even talked on the podcast about how the nature of a client is to come in when they're feeling that pain most acutely. And then five years down the road, when you've been solving that pain for them in their sleep and they don't feel that pain anymore at all, they start to devalue you, right? Like, over time, many clients, some clients are not this way. Some will remember that stuff perfectly. But many clients are like, ah, it's getting harder every month to like, keep, keep paying this, paying this bill because I don't feel that pain like I used to. And before you know it, they bounce because they don't value you like they once did. So take the fact that that's, that's kind of human nature in many ways, but also take just the bigger trends in general of say, productized solutions getting better every single year. You know, like QuickBooks, Live Bookkeeping, TurboTax. Like, those things will continue to come up market like they, they just will. AI developments, making some things that were harder in the past now more trivial. All things kind of erode over time. We've been in a weird flux the last five years where accountants were so in demand that like, actually, by and large, the pricing of what we've done is, has gone up quite a bit, I would say. But the fact remains that if I'm doing the exact same things for 10 years, the value of that thing, in all likelihood a decade from now will be less than it is today. So that brings me to point number three, that your sweet spot has to develop, it has to morph over time from not just the dollar spectrum, but from, to like different spaces and different profiles of people. And this is, honestly, this is driven by bias. Oftentimes where you have a small number of experiences and you're like, oh no, this is the answer now. And so then you kind of go over there and they're like, okay, no, it turns out the true answer is over here. But the only, the risk here is in that sweet spot being stationary and setting up camp and saying, this is what we do now. And I mean, I would argue even the people that say, you know, flipping pancakes is the way to do it, their pancakes are changing over time. They're not the same pancakes that they have always served. And if you're in, if you're in that boat, like the one thing you really got to look out for is falling so in love with your flavor of pancakes that you have today that you're missing the boat on what that better version of pancakes is. And the next, the next pancake. I hear from so many of you that like your, your spouses have to listen to me every morning because you'll have it playing or your kids in the, in the car. I'm so sorry if somebody's walking into the room right now. Your next pancake, it probably shouldn't be a 5x pancake, it shouldn't be a 10x 10x pancake. Certainly probably not going from 500 to 5000, but it still needs to be a better pancake. Like we're all, we're all on the hunt for the better pancake. And this isn't a pancake versus waffle sings. Don't, don't drag us into that muck puddle. I just, I'm not willing to get into it. So sweet spot has to develop over time because there's risk in it being static. Last number four. The speed at which that sweet spot changes will be very different person to person. Take the Bruce Phillips comment for example. Like, he's, he's very scale minded. You don't get to running a huge firm like Aprio without just being wired that way from day one. And so his appetite is like, I'm going to go after the biggest thing always because after 5,000 there's going to be a 15,000 and then a 45,000. Like I'm, I'm always going to go after that bigger project. I think it was him that said the answer may be different for a lifestyle business. I think there's too many like, I don't know, lame connotations with the framing lifestyle business. I think these days there's some people where as soon as you call what they do a lifestyle business, they're like how kind of, how dare you. This is hard too, man. I love, I've, I hope I don't ever run something that isn't a lifestyle business because I don't glorify, I don't glorify work so much that it's like I want to put that head on my lifestyle. And that's not even what people that don't want to run a lifestyle business. That's not even what that implies because maybe like a more scale approach actually enables the lifestyle that, that they really want anyways. Lifestyle business, kind of a loaded thing. But for folks who are like, take Logan graph Mr. 3X. Like his, his whole thing is like I, I would happily slow down and work less right now because I'm doing fine. So the answer for somebody like that, it's like it's going to be very different than the super growth minded person, right? So that sweet spot, it needs to move, it's, it's risky if it's never moving. But also your appetite for the speed at which it moves. It will be different person to person. It will change through different phases of you as a person, as a business owner. There are ways that you can move it when you're doing the work. There's very different ways that you can move it when you're hiring teams of people to do the work. One thing I talk about a lot around like building out what services you're going to offer in your firm is the staff ability of a surface of a, of a service. If we're all blocked on not being able to make another tax hire stop selling more tax services, find something adjacent to it that serves a specific niche that people will pay even better for that is more staffable. And so, and in my case when we were developing kind of the cast managed accounting back office solutions, we designed that stuff in a very intentional way to be as like, as little reliant upon hard to find accounting professionals as possible. And so the majority of the people on that team, they were, they were not accountants. We weren't using accountants to do non accounting things because they were the hardest people to find. And that made it much more possible for us to grow that business quickly because the people who could service that sweet spot were much easier to find. So to recap my progressive flapjack methodology, number one, acknowledge your firm and its current form has a sweet spot. And making a jump out of that will come with inefficiency, but might unlock a sweet spot that you later find is even better. Number two, acknowledge that all things are in a race to the bottom and that there is risk in your sweet spot being static. Number three, by extension, your sweet spot needs to develop not just in dollars and cents, but to different spaces, different specializations, serving different profiles of people. It has to be in progress. And this is maybe the best part of running a firm, is your ability to continue to learn and be smarter about how you design that sweet spot. And then number four, the speed at which that sweet spot changes will be different from person to person. In fact, if you work for accounting firms or if you want to go work for a different one, that's a big one to look out for, that will have an impact on your quality of life. Is the owner somebody that can just like, whiplash and grow that stuff really fast and change that stuff really fast in a way that's uncomfortable to you? Or on the flip side, are you like a firefighter and you love that? Like, that's the environment that is energizing to you? Something to be aware of. Like, the DNA of that firm is that sweet spot. Changing really fast or not is going to impact how good of a fit it may be for you, depending on how you're wired. How does. How did that feel for like a. A level take on what the right answer here is? This is. This is the closest thing to like, a universal truth that I think I could glean from this conversation. Interested to know your take, though. Drop that stuff down in the comments. Please don't waste my time with pancakes versus waffles. Okay, you weirdos. Crepes better. Anyways, I'll see you in the next one.