439 Why Accounting Firm Leaders Need an Assistant

Hiring an assistant, it was one of the like biggest turning points in my firm running journey. It completely reoriented my daily focus on the things that were most important. And today I want to give you a little bit of motivation to get over the hump to maybe consider this if you hadn't before. But also some just very practical tips on how to make the most out of that sort of hire. But also because it's Q and A Friday today we're debating should you build your accounting firm on PCs or on Macs these days? And I got a hot take. I think accountants in the future, I think we are actually like the entrepreneurial tastemakers of the future. The importance of taste and delivering your service through a specific lens and having a specific opinion on the right and wrong ways to do something that is getting more and more important by the day. I'm going to dig into that because you have opinions. Sometimes we're just a little gun shy when it comes to sharing them. But first, assistance. Let's get into it. Foreign. If you're new to the pod, welcome. My name's Jason. I last ran a 40 person accounting firm and on the podcast here we talk about running, just running better accounting firms. If you're watching this on YouTube, there's an audio only feed. If you're on the audio only feed and you want to see my big dumb face, you can find it on YouTube today. Assistance. The vast majority of accountants do not have assistance. And I think it is grounded in this fundamental thing that is at the core of most accountants and that is I don't need help. Help. I'm not the type of person that would have a quote unquote assistant. I can tell you this was embedded in the fabric of the firm that I ran. It was an 80 year old firm I bought out, a couple of the partners, ran it with a partner and nobody in the history of this firm had ever been the kind of person that would have an assistant. So when I did it, I mean I was already like the millennial snowflake that nobody could understand. And this was just, just the nail in the coffin sealing the deal of me just being, I don't know, out of touch or self important or something like that. Real quick off the top, just terminology because you hear a few different versions of this. An executive assistant is usually somebody that works for a specific team member but sometimes can support several executives. A personal assistant and someone that is usually coordinating honestly both personal and business things in your life. The biggest difference is probably just they're doing A lot of the things an executive assistant would do, but it is not out of bounds to also do stuff on the personal side. And then a va, a virtual assistant to confuse matters further, could be both could be one of those two things. Business, personal, whatever. And because I had such a good experience doing this, I, I realized just like how slow we are to hand off things that are not like moving the needle of kind of that trajectory of, of what we're trying to do. If you zoom out a bit and you think like what am I trying to achieve right now? So many of the things that we do every single day we just accept as things that we need to be the ones to do when those do not move the needle at all and take you any to what you're actually trying to build. So if I'm trying to build the best accounting firm that is like the ultimate place to work for single moms in Louisiana, or if I'm trying to build the very best accounting firm for professional golfers, that's kind of, kind of both an external framing and an internal framing there. Whose job is it to reorder the printer toner, to negotiate with the software rep, to make sure that that file a client emailed you ends up in the correct place? Consider on the path to building that thing that will be really fulfilling, that you'll be super proud of, that you'll look back on when you are old and wrinkly. And considering what once was those tasks, what role will they play in the story of your life? Virtually virtually no role. So quit wasting your gosh darn time on it. This notion that like we aren't the type of person who would use an assistant, you know what this, this notion actually does? What this actually, how this actually impacts other people is it doesn't create opportunities for other people because the assistant that you would otherwise pull in, this is a great opportunity for them. Your low value tasks that you don't want to handle for someone else, they are a high value task for them, an opportunity for them. And we're talking about very basic things like moving a file from A to B. And that is like day number one with an assistant. But the reason that you want to have day number one with an assistant is so that you can have day number 1000 with an assistant. And at that stage, like they're absolutely bossing it, they're doing all sorts of valuable things for you that you could not possibly comprehend today. But you can't get there unless you start with the really basic stuff today. And like Just consider the compounding benefits of this. Over decades of being a professional, of running a business, of trying to get home at 6:30 at night instead of 7 at night. So many of us have found ourselves in a position where we're successful at running a business, making money at a point where three years ago version of you would have been like, holy cow, you're crushing it. You should be happy, you should be working less. That's an unthinkable level of success. Yet today in our current form, like, it's kind of hard to feel that even though you know that the version of you, a few years ago they would have said that many of us are now making money, you're beyond that threshold of where more money really makes a meaningful difference. That's not a huge amount of money. Where beyond that it's like, is another 10 grand, another a hundred grand? Is it really going to make that much of a difference for you? We're beyond that threshold where we worked so much, we pumped so much time into building this thing in order to grow it and reach this financial threshold, whatever that is. And now that we're on the other side of that, we're unwilling to spend that money that we just made and the like that, that financial situation that you're in today, you're now unwilling to flip the script to spend that money to get time. And the only way you keep growing is by having the time to do something new, to do something different. If all you're doing is the same thing every single day, expect the same outputs. I don't know about you, I get really bored with the same outputs every day. At some point the script has to flip where you're then for the first time willing to start spending some of that money to get time back. And honestly, like, if you want to have an impact on, on people and other lives when you work, there's no more valuable way to spend money than on other people, than on creating opportunities for them. That's kind of my biggest kind of resistance with the AI stuff. As much as I geek on it, and as exciting as it is, and for as powerful as it seems like it will be, I don't want to lose the opportunity to bring other people along and upskill them as well. Because at the end of the day, beyond that basic financial needs threshold, what freedom looks like to me is freedom of time. It's not another a hundred grand on the bottom line, because oftentimes the folks who are chasing that, they are less in control of their time than they were when they were working for somebody else and that version of them a decade prior that was working for somebody else, that if they could see them now they're like, wow, impressive entrepreneur, running your own business, making four times as much money as I was when I was working for Jim. Seems like they got it all figured out. But then if you look at that person's actual day to day life, they are chained to that business because they now have 10 people working for them that need something of them every moment of the day. The notion of even having a sick day just makes you break out in hives because you think of all the things that the rest of your team won't be able to do because they're all so dependent upon you. For many people, this is what version one of running a small business looks like. And it's not until you get serious about getting out from under just the trivial things you're doing each day that you can escape from that, that like, you can find freedom. Bringing an assistant into the mix is a tremendous exercise in learning to be helpable. Many of us today are not helpable. We have our own arcane ways of doing things that we think nobody else can understand. Because maybe all the other people that you've ever employed are, you know, not at your level of capability and whatever it is that you do. And so you've never worked with someone who can do a thing better than you. And so you may approach the workday from the standpoint that, like, it kind of all falls on your shoulders. And I don't want to delegate because nobody's ever going to do that thing as well as I can do. And as long as that is kind of your mental framework, then you can't be helped. But I can tell you, in my experience, I didn't learn how to do that until I actually had somebody to get help from. And when I had that person, when I had that assistant, it was at that point that I actually learned the skill of delegation. And this is one of the reasons why my accounting firm is always really strongly built around pods and around basically everybody in that pod structure. Having an assistant having a junior that they could send tasks to, because then as a byproduct of getting work done, for one, you're upskilling the people around you really fast because anything that is below you is getting handed off to someone else. And for that person that is actually upskilling them. But the second big thing is that's teaching everybody on the entire team how to delegate. Nobody rolls out of bed knowing how to delegate. And so this kind of builds it into the fabric of how we work. But then third, culturally, it builds a culture of folks that are happy to assist, and they don't see having an assistant or helping each other out as, like, this sort of lesser than thing. Like, no, it's just part of the life cycle of tasks within your business and how they move through people, how tasks represent opportunities, and how if you aren't evolving your tasks, you're not growing. If you do the same things every day, 12 months from now that you do today, that's not growth. If I have a member of my team that's ambitious and wants to do new things and wants to make more money and all these different things, then their daily tasks have to look completely different to get them there. And all of this starts with being slippery with those tasks, being able to go to other people. And organizationally, that example is set from the top. And so if you're incapable of getting those things off of your plate, the even worse news is you are building a whole team of people that aren't going to be able to do that either, because nobody can until you learn. And if you don't teach them, who will? We got to avoid the trap of being kind of a victim of our own circumstances, kind of paralyzed in this situation where where we're at right now isn't good enough and isn't working. But we're also simultaneously unwilling to make the investment or the change or to break the assumption that will get us out of this rut. Oftentimes you can. You can end up stuck in that place for years, and those years look like doing the same thing because I don't have the money to make that hire, or I can't find the right person, or I'm not willing to spend on a recruiter, or I'm not willing to take this risk or serve my clients this different way. And before you know, you look back and you just burned like, two or three years, kind of going nowhere. And as a result, you can kind of slip into this feeling like you're. You're a victim of your circumstances, when it's like, no, like, what makes this all awesome? And the reason you did this to begin with and aren't working for somebody else is the agency that you now have. You got to do something with it. The only way you don't learn is by not changing, not trying that different thing. Today's episode is sponsored in part by the folks at Cloud Accountant Staffing who help you find talented accountants in the Philippines, we get a tremendous amount of inbound from anyone and everyone that's got like offshore staff and wants to come and work for us. Right. So how do you cut through the noise and know who's legit? Well, for one, I'm going to let two offshoring groups sponsor my content and I now know tens tons of firms that have used each of them to great success. Anytime I hear about them using them, I always ask how did it go? How was the experience? Have heard nothing but positives as why we've we've stuck with them. So how's that for a filter? Because I have talked with a lot of them that ought to put them ahead of most. But the other thing to look out for in any of your vendors is are these folks turning up at accounting conferences and having real conversations with real accountants to understand what we need. I take that accountant staffing like they are making the rounds this year. If you are out on the circuit at all like I am, you're going to see them and that is a great signal that they care that they're not some like random offshoring group that are just throwing work at people with all sorts of various skill sets. Like they are very focused on the accounting firm and exactly what your needs are. They're actually run by folks that used to run an accounting firm. Fancy that. Let's call it account staffing. To learn more about them, check out the link down in the show notes. This episode is sponsored in part by Makers Hub gang. It has never been more important than it is today to ensure that you have hitched your accounting firm wagon to the tech partners that are going to take your hand and lead you into the AI era. I don't care if you think AI is going to going to be the end of everything or the start of something better. AI is already here. It's already happening. And Maker's Hub is at like the bleeding edge of what I can enable for the accounts payable process. I know. Wow, sexy. Listen, just be happy that they're doing it so you don't have to use an AI vision models and LLMs to push, you know, automated extraction from bills and kind of the subsequent logic further than we've ever been able to do before with just pure OCR technology technology. And honestly the bigger thing is when you have somebody that knows their stuff like that. And Makers Hub has come around really just in the last couple of years. So really in the age of generative AI, I have a high degree of confidence that whatever is around the corner when it comes to AI, they are in the driver's seat to lean into that stuff in a way that oftentimes the incumbents are not makers up. You're also going to see them out at a whole bunch of accounting conferences this year. So they are having conversations with accountants. They understand the problem of the firm hire on a scalable bill pay service. So if that's something that your firm does or if you got clients with gnarly bill pay issues, makers help do it. It's the platform of choice. Learn more about it down in the show notes. Now I can tell you the biggest mistake that I think almost everyone makes when it comes to hiring an assistant is you think that coming into that you have to have this crystal clear roadmap of all of the ways that they're going to help you. When if this is actually a really good assistant that has experience doing this, they're going to be way better at being able to assist than you are at letting someone assist. And so it's actually going to be them that is like prying things from your, your clenched controlling fists. And this is where actually having a really good assistant can make a big difference. Assisting is a learned skill and you have companies who will do trainings with, with folks to like help them become good assistants. You can hire an assistant that has decades of experience doing this and it will make a really, really big difference. Being a good assistant doesn't just mean that they are like a Swiss army knife kind of person that can do a bunch of things that certainly helps. But nothing is a replacement for experience assisting someone before. So don't come into this thinking that like you have to have this super clear framework for how those people will help you because this looks a little bit different for everybody and even changes through like seasons of life what the most helpful things are for them to do for you. The main thing you have to do is just start. And we are, I don't know if this how everybody is or if it's just accountants. We are chronic overthinkers. We get into analysis paralysis on like technology decisions and workflow decisions. And you're just, you think through it a hundred different ways and in many ways, you know, doing stuff like listening to this podcast can be kind of this cyclical like mental procrastination where we're like thinking through all these different things and thinking and thinking and thinking but not doing. And that can be a real trap with like over consumption of thought leadership. Whereas being biased to action, that's how we learn the goal shouldn't be to get it right on the first drive. The goal should be six, six months from now to be able to do it better. So if I can encourage you to do one thing, pull that person in, find an experienced person and just start, you're going to suck at it at first, but this may be the most important skill that you ever learn, being able to delegate to other people. Now, a few more practical tips here. One, let them into your inbox on day one. Both your physical inbox, if people mail stuff to you, and your digital inbox. Because for most accounting firm owners and most business owners in general, so much of your day ends up tied to the email inbox and a lot of new work and logistical stuff that's all arriving via the email inbox. And so it's a, in some ways, it's the most clear picture into how you're going to have to spend your time that that other person can get to understand how they can better help you. So get them into that right away. Some people have concerns over this. I'm a big advocate of like transparency and email across the entire firm. And, you know, the, the email inbox I don't think should be this proprietary, private thing. Like, nobody that I'm employing is entitled to privacy in their company. Emails like, this is my company. You're talking to my clients. Usually the only thing we need to do to make this fine and more transparent is just don't send HR information over email. Find a different channel to manage that. Like, it ought to be in your payroll platform that the employee then logs into. It shouldn't be in their email client. And once everybody gets on board on this is really nice because if somebody's got to take a vacation, they can be like, hey, Steve, can you like log in and double check that? I don't get any spicy emails so I don't have to be checking it on my phone. Like, this is just a better quality of life for everybody. Again, that's coming back to kind of the notion that we can all assist each other. We can all help each other. So tactical tips, Number one, get that person into your inbox from day one. Number two, have them help you reduce the number of folks you have to answer to. They can serve as like a defense kind of a. Your offensive line that's too sports ball. I don't know, like armor. Because a lot of people will like to come and make asks of you, even if it's not your job to answer that question. In fact, it's kind of the whole premise of the is a book, the One Minute Manager, this one specifically, the One Minute Manager Meets the Monkey subtitle is don't take on the problem. If the problem isn't yours, that monkey doesn't belong to you. Gosh darn it. And the job of that assistant is to properly air traffic control the monkeys to where they need to be. And it's up to you to ensure that you haven't designed a system that makes you the person that has to do everything. And so when I got 100% out of client work in my 40 person accounting firm, that looked like every single client having an owner that wasn't me, every single tool that we used in the firm, having kind of a a champion in the firm who is the expert. All of the big technical matters. They needed subject matter experts within the firm. So that anytime something came to me, the answer was either oh, this other person owns it or oh, we need to create an owner for this thing. And that, believe it or not, was still a full time job for me to help direct, direct that traffic through the firm, identify holes where we needed an owner for something, but we didn't really have somebody with that skill set yet. And once you get there, then this assistant is an even bigger help because they're doing that air traffic controlling for you. A lot of us, this is a mistake that almost everybody makes when they're building a small business for the first time is you hire a person and you work very close with that person. Then you hire a second, then a third, then a fourth and you find, okay, now I'm working very closely with all of these people and oftentimes early on we're gun shy to make a high enough level higher to where that next person you bring in can actually protect you from all those other folks. Or you're a good old boy with the open door policy that thinks the best thing for everyone is if everyone can have access to me and I can help absolutely everyone. But what happens when you try to do that is you do a really crappy job of helping all the people involved. The same person that is not the type of person that would ever have an assistant is the person that's oftentimes spread too thin and not supporting all of the people that they really ought to be supporting. And that's actually where I ended up in my accounting firm was I was much more apt at removing myself from work than the rest of the leaders within our firm. And that created some friction. It actually created a little bit of animosity, where they would see where I could get to and they weren't there. And that was frustrating. And framed through the wrong lens, that could look like, you know, shirking responsibility. When it's like, nope, like, that's delegation now, there's definitely wrong ways to do that, where people get burned and you are kind of like, hiding from those responsibilities or maybe putting too much pressure on the team to do things they're not capable of. So there are for sure good and bad versions of that. But it's a skill that's learned. It comes more naturally to some people than others, and it's one of the most valuable skills that you can learn in running a business because the more you're capable of delegation, the more opportunities you're creating for other people. Third practical tip, don't forget about how you manage your personal life. I think we're kind of getting past this notion of, like, you need this perfect separation from personal and work life, especially in entrepreneurship. The reality is a lot of people, their minds just don't work that way. It is still very important, like, ultimately to be as present as possible in every single moment, whether I'm with my kids, whether I'm doing work stuff, whether I'm with my wife, whether I'm with myself, because I just closed myself in the pantry, because I heard the kids coming, and I hope they don't see that I'm there. But all the drains that you have on your personal life, whether it is a landscaper that likes to call you or that construction project, you're capable of only managing so many relationships. And whether they are personal relationships or work relationships, they all stack, like, into the same list. So you got to determine, like, which of these are worthwhile and enriching for me and which of them are not. We've probably all, at some point in our life worked with the person that was way overextended on the personal side. And there's no way that that then doesn't impact your work. And this for you, this might be an argument for like, having a personal assistant. I don't myself, but just be careful not to pretend that all this stuff on the personal side is not impacting what you want to do on the business side. Like, it absolutely is. That goes both ways, and you have to find a way to manage both. Last tip number four, and we touched on this a bit already. You got to set the example to others of how to be assistable. The only thing worse than the business owner that's not capable of Delegating is having an entire team of people that are now incapable of delegating. And that's the last thing that you want to bake into all the people around you. So you got to learn that skill so that they can first see it, see what that looks like, see the good model of it, and then themselves learn it as well. Because just like, there's folks who want to go out and run their own firm and do a very small thing, and that's completely fine. But if you're like me, where you're like, I want that, but I also want to like, be able to scale my impact a bit. And I get a lot of satisfaction out of hiring folks and creating an awesome work environment for them. Well, think about those people and what's going to give them fulfillment long term? Very likely the same thing. So if that person goes on to run a team of five, and that's the most fulfilling thing that they do, arguably the most valuable skill that I can instill in them is the ability to delegate and to be helpable. Right? All of these things are kind of like compounding skills to develop in entrepreneurship. But if we swing all the way back to the other end of the spectrum of why we haven't done it yet, it's because what, what group, what agency do you recommend to find an. An assistant? How much should I pay a person like this gang? That's. It's. If it's something you've been thinking about more than a couple of weeks, it's procrastination. Just do it. Just pull the trigger. And if it feels hard to make that investment right now, remember, when you pull the right person in, this person is like the whole point of bringing this person in is to multiply your productive output. And so what you see right now, the financial results and all that, that's representative of what you're capable of doing without that individual isn't doing their job and they aren't helping you unless you're able to do way more. You're able to unlock kind of those next opportunities, and oftentimes that won't happen until you can get the time back to make that happen yourself. Highly recommend. Do it. There's a hundred different ways to hire assistants. Your experience will very much come down to who you ultimately get. Don't overthink it. Ask around a bit and pull the trigger. Hey, real quick. This episode is sponsored in part by the folks at Team Up. Team Up. They help you find talented accountants in the Philippines. Team Up's got a killer PDF guide to how to do this stuff. They call it the 2025 salary guide, but it covers way more stuff than just salaries. And one of the things that it digs into is I think the biggest misconception about hiring folks offshore is the difference between outsourcing versus hiring direct. A lot of folks that have had negative offshore hiring experiences, what they're actually doing is working with an outsourcing group where they're buying month end closes or buying tax returns. And it's up to that outsourcing group to manage how it gets done and the training of the team members and all that. That was not the model of offshoring that I did. I did what Team up does. Direct hiring. All it is working with human beings in another country and they're capable of all of the things that my onshore people are. At the end of the day, it's up to me to train them and kind of develop them from A to Z. But there's no like middle person. Oftentimes in these outsourcing groups you're paying an ip. This was the case for me because I'd done both. You're paying that group pretty much the same amount of that person's salary, so like doubles the cost. I just want to work with the person directly. Team up will help you do that. Check out their guide covers a lot of just like kind of the questions you're kind of too embarrassed to ask. You can download that one down in the show notes. Hey, real quick. I write a weekly newsletter, goes out every single Thursday. And let me tell you, it is a banger if you ever struggle to keep up with like a high news updates. Things are happening so fast, Jason. Where do I learn more? What is the most up to date? Tippy, Top hot goss in the industry and tech advice and all that. It's the newsletter, buddy. Straight to your inbox Every single Thursday, 2pm Eastern. Thousands and thousands and thousands of thousands of accountants read it. I'll put a link to it down in the show notes. If you aren't on that list yet, you better get on it. Okay, PC or Mac in 2025? If you were launching an accounting firm tomorrow, what would you roll, boy? Mac. Here's so some context. I grew up a PC user. I was raised Republican. I didn't. I never used a Macintosh. Are you kidding me? Three or four years ago I made the full switch from being total PC dork like build my own PCs in middle school to now. The last three or four years I have completely sold out And I'm now a Mac user. The Mac ecosystem, like it's just, it just, it works better, just does. Everything plays nicer together. You know, the Apple Store is like being able to just go to a place where one company will be responsible for everything happening with your hardware. As opposed to the PC ecosystem. Everybody points their finger at, well, it's the RAM's fault, the hard drives fault, it's this software's fault that's just really frustrating. You pay a premium for Mac stuff. But this is an example of where I don't think the difference is big enough one way or another to overcome what you have muscle memory in. So the folks that are already super, super comfortable with one, that's where they're going to be most productive. It doesn't mean that it can't change and they can't swing to the other platform. Like I've done that from PC to Mac. But I don't think that it super matters, especially as more tech now is SaaS based. The vast majority, majority of the tools that we use are in a web browser. The last crop of tools that you can't do that with like say US tax prep tools, the right way to use those these days is in a hosted environment. And when you're using it in a hosted environment doesn't matter whether you're on a Mac or a PC. So these days honestly doesn't matter unless you're supporting like clients that are using legacy platforms that are PC dependent. Then I would say use whatever you're most comfortable with. Last thing I wanted to touch on the importance of taste in an age of AI and in the age of AI. I've talked about this a bit, but I thought with the Recent developments around ChatGPT image generation and kind of the place of graphics designers now with really good AI image generation tools and modification tools, like, I think this just really shines a light on something that is relevant for accountants. We talked about this a bit on Monday, but I wanted to drill into that a little bit more. If you think about what graphic designers right now think about ChatGPT image generation, they all look at that and they say that's not as good as the stuff that I do. And they're right. And they look at what people create and they're like, that could be very high, high fidelity and, and accurate and sharp and impressive. But that doesn't mean it doesn't suck. That doesn't mean that thing they just made as helpful or achieves the ultimate goal. A guy from a creative agency I think I've shared this on the podcast before. In an interview maybe 12 months ago, I heard him say that the job of a designer is not to make the design. The job of a designer is to decide what the design ought to be. And that sounds nice, right? You're like, yeah, no, that's. That's kind of me as an accountant too. My job isn't to do the accounting, is to decide what it ought to be. But the reality is 95% of people in these fields where they spend their time is on doing the work, not deciding what it ought to be. And so there's no way around the fact that this doesn't impact people. And if you have a similar situation in accounting or in tax, where you have something or a tool that can get you really far, it's not as good as the same tool in the hands as a pro, but it can get you 80% of the way there without any expertise, then what remains? And I think there's a number of things that remain from, you know, even in a incredibly powerful AI scenario where it kind of wipes out knowledge work, there's a number of things that, that remain. Like anything experiential, anything that brings humans together. In fact, accounting firms, particularly specialized accounting firms, are very well positioned to benefit from this. You're very unique hubs of certain types of people. And let's say we have technology that tomorrow does all of our accounting and tax work for veterinary clinics. Well, veterinary clinics are still going to exist even if the accounting and tax work went away. And there's still going to be tremendous benefit for those entrepreneurs to be able to come together. And right now, if you have 100 of those clients, you're one of the most unique hubs there are to, to be that connector. And it's probably going to be new ways that you would need to support them. Even if accounting and tax went away overnight, which seems very unlikely, right? But part of your business then likely becomes, I am the hub. And so it's something that you have today that may not even be something you make money on or think of as your business today, but in the future, it could very likely become your business. And similar to how graphics designers now, the very best ones aren't going to be the ones that can do what ChatGPT does manually. They're going to be the ones that can make something that make people actually stop and go, wow. Or stop and say, that's really helpful. For example, you can have two different people draw a visual diagram for the exact Same thing, and one will land and hit instantly with people and the other will be super confusing. Similarly, a graphics designer like that becomes the job is, are we effectively communicating what we're trying to communicate? And if we draw the parallel here to accounting and the doing of the work being simplified, if that ends up happening, which seems likely to some degree, then if everyone has these powerful machines to do that work in a more simplified way, then it makes your taste all the more important, right? So it makes your opinions on how the right and wrong ways to do that work is and makes your opinions on what the output ought to look like all the more important. Because even in a world where all the veterinary clinics, accounting and tax work can be done by a machine at the drop of a hat, there's still space for someone to be opinionated about what is the right way to run this type of business, or manage your paperwork, whatever that looks like, or manage the back office for a vet clinic. It makes you being opinionated more important than ever. And the biggest blocker we have to be an opinionated today is not serving a specific enough profile of client. It's very hard to get to like a reporting framework or an advising framework when you're serving anybody and everybody. Right? There's for sure ways that you can have taste and be opinionated in the right ways to approach entrepreneurship, even if you're. You're serving a wide variety of clients. But it does get infinitely easier the more specific the people you serve are. So to give you an example, in my firm we served a lot of single doc dental clinics. And we also did work with DSOs, these dental service organizations that were kind of rolling up dental groups. And we saw kind of how yucky that was. And by the end of my firm running journey, I was like, this kind of sucks. Like the corporate world and PE coming into dentistry, like it's running a lot of people out, patients aren't having good experiences. And I ended up being sort of an advocate for that single doc clinic. And within that I was very opinionated. The doc shouldn't be doing stuff in the back office fee for service work where people just paid with cash or on a subscription. That broke you free from insurance providers paying you whatever they wanted for the service you were delivering because the insurance providers had all the power. So I had kind of a collection of things that I was very opinionated on. This is the right way to run this sort of practice and considering like the landscape they were operating within. And I wish that we were more opinionated on how we put that out there because that's, that's a lighthouse for people that feel similarly or who see that and they're like, yeah, no, actually that does solve this fear. And that fear that is running a dental clinic or running accounting firms that serve that type of client with taste. My version of taste then is that I'm opinionated on what makes sense to do right now in this environment with everything that's changing. And we oftentimes, like we are accountants, can be very, very opinionated people. But we're afraid to put that out there when that's the very thing that will help more people find you and ensure that we are relevant in, in any time AI sort of timeline scenario. And I don't think AI is like going to wipe out the stuff that we're doing in the next 36 months. If it does, then it wiped out all of knowledge work. It's not just an accounting thing. But even in these very aggressive AI timelines, what remains is what do you have to say, like, what's your take on the right way to do this? That becomes really, really important. We covered a lot of ground today, gang. A hot Friday. You got any comments or thoughts, drop them down below. Always fun jamming on your questions on Fridays. And hey, have a great weekend. I'll see you in the next one.