444 10 Ways to get 10x The Return for your Time

I feel like it's never been more en vogue to outwork everybody else. And I guess somewhere there will be somebody who works harder than everyone else. But what a. What a bummer success metric. We all know that person who will spend decades on end doing the exact same thing over and over again, waiting for someone else to bless them with the gift of progress. That's kind of what work looks like for most people is toiling when your fate is ultimately in the hands of somebody else. But once you're an entrepreneur and doing your own thing, how do we ensure that, like, those efforts are worthwhile? I'm going to share with you 10 lessons that I've learned from what have been the. The highest yield periods of my life relative to. I had like six or seven years of my life that kind of just disappeared. And if you're not careful, that can happen actually really, really fast. Let's do a bit of a reset today. Think about how we're spending our time and making sure that we're. We're actually getting the most of it. Could you only get one chance? Right? Let's talk. Foreign. It's funny, there's different, like, tipping points in your life. Like when you get out of college or join the workforce for the first time when you have kids, oftentimes maybe you have like a serious medical event or a loss close to you or something like that. There's these like big moments in your life that change the value that you assign to time. And I can tell you, at least through my career progression, as the things that I'm responsible for have mounted, you have like this simultaneous effect of experience showing you how to better apply your time. Like I go back to like before I had kids and the volume of time that I had, it was enviable. And I don't know if the goal is to just work more right now, which it really isn't. But that was a very different time in my life where back then it would have been unthinkable to be able to do what I do now in the time that I do. In fact, oftentimes when we look at other people that look like prolifically high output, it's because they have found some sort of force multiplier that you haven't. And that may be building a better machine to, to do that than you may know how to build right now. It oftentimes is, is also what they don't do that you do. And when we look at folks that look really busy and it look like. Looks like they're Doing all of these things. And we think, how can they fit it all in? Oftentimes the place to start is to consider, what do they do? Sorry, what, what do they not do? Refuse to do that I'm still doing. And in those things that we're willing to give up, oftentimes we find the capacity for the better thing. And the most obvious example of this is your client list. As long as you just let those people hang on at those legacy rates, they're, they're filling capacity that could better be spent by going out to a trade show, being more visible, putting in efforts that will increase the likelihood that that next tremendous client comes in the door. Okay, 10 very specific examples of how to get a 10x return for your time as opposed to simply selling your time for money or exchanging your time and your efforts in very low leverage ways. And like one on one client work. As much as many of us get into this game because we love that and enjoy it and get a lot of satisfaction from it, it's by definition the lowest leverage thing you can possibly do. It's not to say that you can't do it, but I can definitely tell you the, the greater the premium that I've put on my own time, the more it hurts to do anything in that one on one setting. And for me, like that goes to the extreme of I don't take zoom calls by and large. Like, I'll get outreach from 20 to 30 software companies every single week. And I used to have chats with people and I just, I don't do that anymore. And in the, in the situations where I do take calls with accounting firms and stuff like that, I could probably draw a, a, a line graph over the years and months of how many people are usually on those calls and it's gone up. Cause oftentimes those things that you do in one on one settings can also be done even better in group settings where it's beneficial for folks to hear from the other people on the call. Anyways, 10 very specific things to all kind of around working smarter, not harder. And by the way, the most prolific people, they do both. They work very hard in a very smart way. Number one is build the things that work without you so you know, your business rises to the level of your vacations. Did I say that the right way? Can your business still run when you're not there? In fact, I had this recently, I was in London, we had a whole bunch of stuff going on with my business and it was like, I've had so many examples of this in, in my life. It was like magic how things all of a sudden that were impossible to be done without me somehow just happened while I was gone. And a bun. Like several people stepped up, got some things out the door that normally I would have blocked. And ever since then, the process has been completely different. I had a bunch of examples of this in my accounting firm as well, where I was taking what seemed like an impossibility, like an impossibly long break or when I was out of the country, like, I wouldn't have network access. And there were things that just by. By the current system were not possible to do at all, but they, like, they still happen. We found a way to do them. And sometimes those forcing functions are the very best thing. And so how can you actually build that into your business? What does that look like for you to be away on, on a regular basis, for team members to have to take time away? I had examples of this in my team as well, where, like, someone would go on maternity leave and we would compress like three years of delegation probably into those two months. Now, at a more macro level for you, as, as an entrepreneur, there are certain things that you can invest in that will work while you sleep and other things that you have to be plugged into and do every single little thing by yourself. That this is the value of creating content, creating evergreen stuff that lives on YouTube or on a podcast or a blog post. The value of building systems that other people can follow. Finding a business that can operate on a version of your expertise that's institutionalized. And it may not be as good as the real thing, but the real thing only has so many hours in the day. Right? It's where we start thinking about how can I do something that will dazzle this customer so that they will pay me to instead? How do I build the machine that will deliver some sort of result that people will pay for? And where we often get stuck is, well, that machine's not capable of doing what I can do. It's like, yeah, that's. That's also kind of the point. Cause you can't do everything. Number two, transition your thinking to who not how. Great book, who not how. We've talked about it on the podcast before. Your firm is going to be as good as the people that you can attract to it. Oftentimes this is really hard because we haven't found a voice for our firm yet, similar to, you know, the. What we present outwardly to clients and is maybe we don't have the confidence yet to Say who we're great for and who we're not great for. It's equally important to be able to do this on the career side, on the hiring side, for people to know that your firm exists, understand how you work differently. Otherwise, what is in it for them to come to work for you? Another framing I've heard recently is your. Your dreams have to be big enough for ambitious people's dreams to fit within them. Oftentimes we get frustrated that we can't find these, you know, unicorns or people with enough drive. And sometimes that can be a reflection from you or at the very least how you communicate your own ambitions. Like if you don't carry yourself as a confident person who has, has a vision for the future that other people can get behind, or even worse, you have that, you just don't communicate it, then it's, it's not really painting a picture that other people can follow. And there is not a single thing within your business that someone else cannot do better than you. And that's a really big unlock, especially for small business owners. We see this in the clients that we support. Always having to be the smartest person in the room and, and being threatened by folks who are more capable of them than them at certain things. But you've also had the experience of when you find just the right person for that thing. There is no better feeling in the world when it's like oh my gosh, I'll never have to touch that part of the business again and it'll be better for it. Like they're even better than me at doing that thing. And like finding that person. There's, there's no greater feeling. But what percentage of your time do you commit right now to the efforts that will find that next person, bring them in the door. For most of us, it's, it's very, very simple. It's working with a recruiter or putting up a job posting. It's not being visible. Similar to how we talk about like the very best clients aren't combing through Google reviews to find a new firm. The good accountants are probably not skulking freaking indeed to find an accounting job. Imagine, imagine like what's combination of events would have to happen for you to be cruising indeed for an accounting job. That's probably not where, where the world beaters are hanging out. That being said, I also hired some pretty great people off of Indeed also fielded thousands and thousands of applications from Indeed. That, that, that weren't great. They just weren't. Okay, number three, as you're considering a new project or initiative or service line or whatever that change is, consider who's got the shortcut for you. Because there's nothing new under the sun when it comes to accounting for running. And I spent like a decade of my career just like being the tinkerer who was doing weird off the wall things that I thought nobody else was doing. And I took a lot of pride in that and there were some cool good ideas in there. But man, did my journey accelerate a lot when I just started asking around, seeing what other people were doing, and then picking and choosing my favorite bits of like what had already been validated and what was actually working. If, if you're considering a change, a big change, either a new service line or moving to a new niche or bringing in a partner, acquiring a firm or something like that, consider how months or years, massive piles of money could be saved by finding the right person to have a conversation with that can show you the path, show you the things to avoid. If somebody else has done this before, and I guarantee you there's, there's just about nothing left in this space that somebody hasn't tried that you can't learn from. If somebody's done this before and you're, you're stuck on the right way to do this, oftentimes we, we like, we just spin our wheels and think for months and months and sometimes years guessing, is this or that the right answer? When there's people out there that have the answers, your ability to navigate those decisions ultimately will be a product of the quality of your network. And that's the biggest thing in my life that's changed in the last six years is the quality of my network. From only knowing the people inside of my firm and just pl playing the game inside of that tiny universe that was a single 40 person firm to now knowing like thousands of accounting firms. And anytime something comes up, I know someone I can go ask. Like I know where I can get an answer. That's such an unbelievable hack for everything from strategy to hiring to like emotional support from other people that do what you do that's so, so valuable. I'll put my token community plug in here for realize because that's like solving for this is kind of my life's mission now. Creating as streamlined of a process as possible for you to build a really, really powerful network. That's the whole purpose of my community. Realize there's a link in the show notes as there always is. I learned this lesson getting out of my own bubble for the first time and Going to conferences and realizing, oh, the talks at this, these conferences, they're fine. But what I'm really excited to do is actually talk with all the other practitioners. That's extremely energizing. And I can steal the best of what's working for everyone else rather than spending decades trying to reinvent the wheel myself. 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 Ups 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 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 is you're 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, 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. And I've. 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 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. This episode is sponsored in part by clienthub. Who's ready to turn your busy season into you ready for it. Into your wow. Wow season. Actually your whole year into your wow season. How are they going to do that? Jason, I'm glad you asked. Three bullet points. First, it's all about the client experience. Make it easy for your clients to communicate with you and half the battle is already won. 2. Simplicity Client Hub. It is not any harder than it needs to be in a lot of practice management systems these days. Let's just say it's getting a little sweaty. You step into Client Hub, you try it out and you're like, oh, this, this actually feels like a nice place to be. And number three, AI stands for artificial. What was it stands for artificial intelligence. You know, I like that. Client up. It'll help you draft emails with AI. They got a new like automated book review thing that pulls in some AI. Say goodbye to busy season, man. Make the commitment. We're not doing it again. They've got a limited time promo right now. 50 bucks off your first three months. They give you a personalized demo because you want it to go better next year, right? I want that for you. Make this the last stressful busy season you'll ever have with clienthub. Link down in the show Notes number four, don't have humans do what software can do. And you may have heard someone say this before. We ran the numbers and found that we could just hire someone to do something for the same cost. But if you've hired humans and you run a team, you know, anytime there's humans involved, that creates inertia. And inertia is, it's, it's increasingly hard, the bigger your team gets to be able to change direction. And you can see right now in accounting firms that are like still running on paper and still using legacy tech, the, the change that that requires and what's involved in rewiring an accountant's brain to get them to be efficient in a totally different approach to work. Or if you're into rolling up accounting firms and you're, you're looking at the firms that are on the market, very few of them are like actual cool modern firms. And if you've ever acquired one that was a legacy firm, you know, just how much work it is to even go from one cloud practice management system to another. Like, that's a massive undertaking. And so how do you build a firm that is as lean as possible for the future? Because things are still going to change. You, you lean into software wherever you can. Now we still need to have like intelligent humans who are adaptable and can be involved in that process. I don't see these two things as being mutually exclusive, but I do see a lot of people going human first. Or if all else all things look equal, they will go for the human. Whereas tech, like, it's improving at a really rapid rate. And the, the bigger the headcount we have, actually the harder it is to keep up with that tech change. Again, we have to have both. We have to have smart humans, but we also have to have tech. I would say on average firms are probably under leveraging the tech side. They are not like even in my little echo chamber of the folks I hang out with online, like it's still pulling teeth to get folks using like a tax intake tool. The vast majority of accounting firms are still not using cloud practice management systems. Leaning into that, the product of that is being able to run a more agile firm. Okay, number five, stop reinventing the wheel. For most things where, where someone else has already done it, there's a, there's a proven path. And you know, for us this rears its head in a bunch of different places like running one on one meetings, running month end financial statement recaps with, with clients posting on social media. Like you don't have to do these things from scratch every single time. Build the system, build a framework. When it comes to content, go out, find the past stuff that you've done that's the highest performing stuff. Find a way to remix that like nobody cares. The greatest proxy when it comes to content creation for what's most likely to work the next time you post something is what's already worked in the past. Not only from you, but, but from others. In fact, you go out and you hire like big name YouTube strategists. And what do they do? They point you to all the stuff everybody else is already doing that, that works. And they say find your version of this. There's a chance that you may be the first one to stumble into something that works really well. But it's a very, very small chance, especially when you don't know what you're doing. But the good news is we have this like massive database of what everybody else does that actually works. Start there. Like that's a great place to go to get ideas for how to package things better in a more interesting way. And look at what you've already done, that works just fine. If you go back to you know, say your most successful client onboarding calls or monthly financial statement recaps or one on ones consider how can I systematize those to tick all the boxes to like actually think about what made that go well. And is this a framework that I can roll out with the rest of my team to handle these things or to operate, operationalize something that maybe to date was just done on gut or on experience. Number six, rather than being paralyzed by whether or not I should do this thing, ask the question, what will I learn from this? Because the only way you don't learn is, is just by not doing that. Thing And I think we're all afraid of, of like to making decisions too fast and whiplash and looking dumb in front of our clients. If we're like changing the software interface they use, wearing out our teams, for sure that's a risk. But there's a balance here where running tests and finding ways to do it without wearing out the team, because not all tests, not all changes are made equal. The more of this stuff you're able to do, like, the more you're able to learn from what works and what doesn't. I think you augment with this with conversations with other people who are doing the same things and you end up with a much clearer framework how to make your next decision. Like for example, when I made the decision to get out of firm running a couple years ago and sell my firm back to my partner, it was when I realized I could fill that time with conversations with a whole bunch of accounting firm owners. So it was almost as if I was going into the business of doing what I used to do when I would go to accounting conferences, which was like my highlight of the year, meeting new people that ran firms and getting to steal ideas from them and all that. For me, not running a firm anymore looked like doing that around the clock. And it meant I was, I would become out of touch with some aspects of day to day accounting firm running. But I was getting in touch with a level of depth and understanding how small firms work that firm owners wouldn't be able to be privy to because they're in the day to day of their own firms. And the result has been like a tremendous amount of learning for me. So that when I'm presented with a new idea or a new approach to something, like I just have a really good filter of all the things I've heard from folks about all the reasons why that may work, why it may not work, connections or platforms or people that could increase the likelihood that it works. Like that's all just a product of learning. And you won't learn without doing number seven. Instead of doing it by end of quarter, consider what could be done by end of day. So often we have an idea and we're like, yeah, no, that's something that we should test down the road. Especially in accounting firms that are sort of run on these annual cadences, we tell ourselves, no, we're only allowed to do this stuff once a year. But that is such a long learning cycle actually makes change really, really high stakes if you only allow yourself to change once per year. So consider, is there like A small scale test we could do within the year that would validate what we're thinking. A great example of this is like moving to three tier proposals. If I've convinced you, like, oh yeah, this'll be, this'll help my firm be more profitable. We've talked about this quite a bit lately. You're like, yeah, we gotta do that next January. If you're convinced, find a way to do it now. Like, who are the people that you want to get on, you know, say a tax planning engagement or you know, a more premium bookkeeping engagement. Who are the people who you want to do that right now? Put a three tier proposal in front of them now, like actually take some of the pressure off of just doing that stuff at year end. And even if you don't do a full rollout now, when you do a full rollout at the end of the year, if that's the right move for you, you're going to go into that in a much better, like educated space. You'll be asking smarter questions, you'll set it up in a more intelligent way because you've done some of it now. And this like as, as I talk with my team, oftentimes you'll be talking through something and we'll be, they'll be like, yeah, no, we'll add this kind of to the backlog, add it to the list. And it's like, no, like, is there a reason that we can't do this today and get to the end of it and make a decision? And oftentimes the answer is like, no, we could totally do that right now. Kind of comes back to the learning thing and the speed at which you're, you're testing validating the things that you're hearing and all of that ought to lead to higher quality decision making. Three more to go here. Number eight. This one drove my partner nuts. Relentlessly. Try to get out of everything that you're doing now and never stop. I got really good at this in the accounting firm and there's a good version of this and a bad version of this. Trying to get out of all of your responsibilities. Oftentimes like if somebody says that out loud, you will think, well, what am I going to do if I don't do X? What am I going to do if I don't prepare tax returns, if I don't sign tax returns, if I don't review tax returns, if I don't sign off on the month end close? What am I, what am I even going to do? If you ever get to a day where you actually have nothing to do, where you actually successfully delegated everything off of your plate, tip of the cap to you. You may be the first person I meet who actually achieves that because there's always something else. There's always the exceptions. There's the stuff that slips through the cracks as the business owner. Like that's you're the job. You are, like that is your job. You're the bottom of, of the filter of everything that runs through the business that doesn't nicely plug into stuff that's happened into the pat in the past and you decide how to handle it. But instead what we do is we're like, oh no, I'm going to choose this line, this is what I'm going to do. And we forget about all that stuff and you build yourself what you think is a 40 hour a week job or whatever you think it's going to be, but you forget about all the other stuff that comes around that and before you know it, you're doing a really bad job of what your job is supposed to be because you've got too much on your plate. In my firm, this looked like getting out of client work and all the questions there were exactly what you'd expect. If you don't do client work, what are you going to do? It was a 40 person firm. There was a whole lot of stuff to do. In fact, the most important things to do for that firm had nothing to do with the clients. They were. How are we going to find like the great next hire for our team? How are we going to find the great next client and sort of position ourselves to attract more of those great clients? Like they were all the things that were the very most important to the health of the firm. But until I fired myself from those other jobs, like I wouldn't have the bandwidth to work on that stuff. Number nine, Calculate the cost of not doing something. If the road ahead looks scary and risky and expensive, remind yourself, here's the current state of things. Oftentimes that's just as risky, just as scary and just as costly. This episode is sponsored in part by Cloud Accountant Staffing. I'm in another country today. I'm in. I'm in London, which is not a country, it's a city. And I realize that. But I'm here because there's accountants everywhere. Accounting is in many ways a universal language and a great upside of that is you can hire accountants to work for you anywhere in the world. Cloud Accountant staffing, they're an accounting firm that Started hiring folks directly in the Philippines, had such good luck with this that they started doing this for other accounting firms and now they will do it for you. This is true story. I was in a coaching call with some folks in my online community. Realize every Wednesday I run like a live coaching call with different types of firms and offshore hiring came up because people were like, I think the prompt was what's the biggest positive change you made in 2025 this year? Something you wish you had done years earlier. And one person shared it was for them as offshore hiring. We talked through that a little more like upwards of probably a third of the people on that call were actively making offshore hires. I've shared before. I did did that at the end of my firm running journey and it completely changed how we approached hiring and very rapid succession. We brought in four people from the Philippines. If you haven't done it before, you're going to have a lot of like embarrassing questions. You don't even know what to ask. Just start the process. Get on the horn with cloud accountant staffing. They can answer all those questions for you. Got nothing to lose. Check out the link to them 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 highness 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 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. Last 1, number 10. Don't be careful not to anchor yourself and the impact that you have today. And I'll kind of dig into like my life history and kind of illustrate this. When would it have started? Well, when I was 18 years old, I worked at a grocery store. Heck of a grocery store. It was in like a rough part of town. We had beer runners every single night. Basically someone would come in and grab like a giant case of beer and they run out the door. My first day, oh gosh, my first day of work at this grocery store. I was about to walk through the doors and a guy comes running out and just gets laid out by this huge dude behind, behind him. The guy looks like he's like straight out of American Gladiators. Just tackles this dude full speed. To the ground. Two grown men, like, sliding across the pavement as, like three cans of soup go rolling out of this one guy's jacket. And evidently it was like a secret shopper that was like, catching some guy that was stealing stuff. This is me walking into work on my first day, and I walk in and I'm like, I don't know where to go. And I'm like, some guy just got laid out out there. And like, oh, yeah, no, that's Jeff, that's fine. Don't worry about that. Like a. Like a week later, there was like, somebody got shot in the parking spot next to my car. There were like, little chalk circles around where the bullet casings were when I went out to leave that night. Weird job. But when I went to go and give my two weeks before I went to college, the GM was like, you gotta. You. You gotta be kidding me. You're gonna leave this. This gig? At this point, I was doing, like, grocery bagging and inventory stuff, and I wanted to be checking people out, but I hadn't gotten there yet. But this guy, he evidently saw. He saw a bright future for me. He's like, you realize. Like, you realize, son, you could have my job someday. And I kind of looked around and I was like, I don't think I want this job. So I got an internship when I was in college at an accounting firm. I wasn't even an accounting major at that point. I was a computer science major. But the internship, my sophomore year, paid better than any of the internships. My buddy got. Buddies my buddies got and started working in February in a tax firm with five people in it. Wouldn't you know it? What a place to end up, really my origin story. And I just haven't found a way to leave yet. So I worked there for two or three years. I realized, wow, this. This firm owner has like, this power to brainwash the people that works work for him into thinking that they need him somehow. And it was this weird, like, very toxic place to work. Hundred hour weeks were just completely normal. There would be times where I try to sneak out at midnight, and he'd be like, where the heck do you think you're going? We're about to go over this file together. My senior year of college, senior finals week, the school, the university was like 35 minutes away through these kind of back roads. And I didn't sleep two nights in a row because I. During finals week, because I was driving back and forth during tax season. And he was like, you got a lot of stuff to get Done, buddy. Finals week, senior year of college. Didn't sleep two nights in a row. These were completely reasonable requests of, of the staff as far as the firm owner was concerned. And about a year after I graduated, I told him I was like, I'm gonna put in my two weeks. I don't think this is the place for me. And he said, you gotta be kidding me, man. Look, look around you. This could all be yours. And I looked around me and I was like, I don't think I wanna do this. I went to the next firm. I worked there six or seven years before buying out a couple of the partners owned it for a few years with my partner. Started doing this content creation stuff, looked at all the people I had at the firm, and at this point I had hired several people off of Twitter. Like, this firm had been totally reshaped around my vision for how to run a firm. Not that it didn't have like legacy elements, but it was for sure like swimming in, in the, the direction that I'd set it. A lot of clients and a lot of staff were there because of me. And at that point I'd been doing thought leadership stuff online for a couple of years and realized like, oh, this could one, become an actual business, but also two, like aid the entire accounting industry and how firms are made and the expectation of like, what it even looks like to go and work at a, at a small accounting firm. And I could go down that path or I could stick with, with the, the staff and the clients who were extremely dependent upon me. Like in many ways. Those were like my, my super vans, like the folks who most bought into the vision that I had for running an accounting firm. And I was then going to leave. Now, I would tell you the devil's in the details of, of how you do that. There's okay ways to do that and really bad ways to do that. But what I didn't fall in love with was like my footprint, the people who I could impact, like the impact that I could have at that point in time. And oftentimes we get too anchored in the people that are dependent upon us today to be able to see how we can help people either in a more compelling or higher volume way if you make that change. And we see so many examples from this as simple as being afraid to increase your prices because oh my gosh, that's going to devastate Mark. Mark's dude, Mark's gonna be just fine. If he's that upset, he'll go find somebody else to do his stuff. And again, the devil's in the details of how you do this. But oftentimes to get more out of your time, there's a fundamentally different way for you to put yourself out into the world that is by definition higher leverage than what you do today. For me, that came at a point in time when I had a zero year old, a one year old and a three year old and I looked at my 40 person accounting firm and I said, I'm helping these people, I'm helping these clients. I think I'm really making a difference. But there's also this other path and I don't really know what it looks like. I don't know how to explain it to people. I can't even point to any great examples of other folks doing what I'm considering. But I'm pretty sure down this path I'm better leaning into some unique skills that I have and I'm going to help people in a much more efficient exchange than like going over here and serving clients one on one or working with staff one on one. But to get there required some really hard decisions, required some incredibly hard conversations, a lot of fear. I mean, I just, I had like, I had, I had peaked. I was a partner at a firm. Like I'd beaten the game. That is the game if you're in public accounting. Reaching partner, owning the firm. I beat the game and everybody was proud of me. I got, I'm a cpa, I own a firm, this and that, they understand what that looks like, seems super stable. And then I tell them, yeah, I'm actually going to go, going to go do this. You're gonna, you know what, now you got three little kids and you're gonna go do this weird fly or whatever, this accounting influencer. Explain that to me again. You can see it, right? Because you can see like how much reach content can have and all that stuff and how it's a fundamentally higher leverage thing. You can see that. But like when I started down that path, there wasn't a model for how to do that. I still am learning so much about, about how to help people and get out of your own way. But I'm also convicted that that's like a higher leverage way to, to put what I do out into the world. And it doesn't fit nicely into the box of what an accounting firm is or the more traditional path. But you won't find that next thing. You won't be willing to take a flyer on that. If you're, you're anchored in the impact that you have today. And a lot of people, they will get a certain percentage into their career and then they will stop and that will be. That will be it. Like, they'll put the anchors down. They'll say, this is what's known and understood. I'm helping people here, and I'm just going to do this until the end of. And maybe that's fine for you, but it wasn't for me. And that breaking point was my time is now more scarce than ever before because I have these little runts running around my house that want to spend time with me. And so I somehow I have to break that calculation. Like the math there has to change. And without that, honestly, I'd probably still be running a firm. I probably wouldn't have had the stones to go out and do something new. I just knew that somehow I had to change the calculation. And sometimes it takes big change like that for you to get to a happier spot if you feel like you're. You're trapped or stuck in what you're doing today. But that's also the agency. Like the upside of entrepreneurship is that level of agency that you have. You go from being able to blame the boss to. To still blaming the boss. It's just the boss as you. And I much rather blame myself than somebody else. Big day yesterday. If you're listening to this, the day it came out big. Biggest US deadline there is, even though it's not really deadline. Congrats. If you're a tax pro getting over the hump there, put yourself first. Consider what ought to be next for you. Oftentimes the pain of something like that is very quickly forgotten until you get there next year and you're like, goodness sakes, I'm doing this again. Hang on to that. That pain, that rage. Maybe that's not right the right way to say that, but. But don't, don't forget that. Don't lose perspective of it because oftentimes it's the motivation you need to like, make that harder, harder. Next decision, gang. Thanks for being here today. Any other wisdom, drop that stuff down in the comments and I'll see you in the next one. It.