453 Revamping A 4 Partner Accounting Firm

Today I've got information anonymously submitted to me by a four partner firm, a very traditional tax and accounting firm. Actually this thing bears so much resemblance to the accounting firm that I bought five years ago. But the perspective, it's actually from an employee of the firm. How do you change a firm that's got four partners, a whole bunch of stakeholders, and getting an alignment across, across all those people, my goodness, it's a lot of work. So what are the things realistically you can change about a firm like this? It's a big ship, not a, actually not a huge ship. But whether you're an employee in the firm or one of the partners that wants to take something in a different direction, how do you get everybody working in the same direction? I'll show you the very real things that I actually did in a similar situation to take what was a very traditional firm and put it on a slightly better path towards modernization. Let's get into it. Foreign. If this is your first time here, welcome. This is called Roast a Firm. It's a recurring format we do where people anonymously submit details to me about their accounting firm. We try to give them some practical ideas for how to improve it. It gives you an opportunity to put the coach's hat on and be like, yeah, what do they need to do to improve? Because oftentimes that's a whole lot easier than, than fixing your own stuff. Now if you want a chance to be roasted on the podcast, there's a form down in the show notes, send me your goodies anonymously and we might just do the same. Okay, let's get into it. This is a four partner firm in a pretty good sized Midwest city. So their, their clients are a mix of city clients, but they still have a good number of rural clients as well. They do tax accounting and payroll is a pretty standard US tax firm that also does a good amount of bookkeeping. The person who submitted this, because it's actually an employee of the firm, they don't know what revenue looks like. But I'll tell you the makeup of the team and we can probably back into a pretty close revenue number. So they've got 34 people in total that are all in office in 2025. Here's the org chart. At the top you got four partners. Below that you've got five CPAs slash seniors. Below that you've got 14 tax pros and another two that are part time. You've got one full time IT person, four full time admins, four full time payroll people, and one more part time payroll person. A lot, a lot of payroll staff. You're probably already getting some thoughts. So 34 people in this firm. This is probably probably three to four million dollars a year firm. They can definitely do more with the people they have. We're going to talk about how they currently price their projects. This is a, is a volume shop which is actually kind of the default. Like this is very normal to me. This is actually like a perfect snapshot of totally normal US accounting firm. Their tech stack was almost identical to the tech stack that I had initially in my firm. Thompson Reuters practice accounting cs that's Thomson Reuters accounting product fixed assets, Ultra tax share file for exchanging files, QuickBooks for some accounting and ACS for payroll. Now the person submitting this, I think they know this is like probably a decades old text tech stack. And while there's a ton of stuff that we could do on the tech stack front, oftentimes that's like where we're naturally pulled is into workflow and geeking on tech stuff because it's more fun than the more meaningful conversation that is like positioning of the firm and maybe firing some clients and changing our pricing and strategy. That all comes with a lot of emotional baggage attached to it and it's what makes us very quickly snap back to let's talk about tech so more maybe we can tech our way out of this positioning or profitability firm. When the reality is oftentimes tech and workflow is like kind of at the bottom of the list of priorities. Priorities compared to the spicier stuff on the list. So we're going to start with the spicier stuff, but we'll get to the tech in the end because there's definitely a lot of stuff we can do workflow wise with this firm. So number one, I'm going to, I'm going to wear the hat of the person who completed this form from the perspective of the employee of this firm. But the advice for the employee would actually be pretty much the same as the advice for one of the partners if they're like man, I really want to do this stuff but I got to get all my partners on board and they just don't get it. Always keep in mind in any sort of change management that that feeling of they just don't get it is always a product of what have you been exposed to that they haven't been exposed to. Right. We're all programmed by the things that we consume. And you will, you know, say you read, you know, Ron Baker stuff on, on value pricing or Brandon Hall's newsletter or maybe Chad Davis or Twyla. Have you like, pumped up on AI stuff on social media. That stuff becomes ingrained into you and then you go to other people in your life and you're like, why are all these people not excited too? It's not realistic. Right? Like, we can't expect everyone to at to be responding to the world in the same way that you are when the things you're being exposed to very different than the things they're being exposed to as well. Right. And this is actually the. One of the best bits of advice I can give you as sort of a guerrilla change maker is expose these people to the things that you're being inspired by. Some of it will land, some of it won't, but it like baby steps them in and kind of the direction that you're trending and thought leadership, like the type of stuff that I do online, that's one thing and that's better than nothing. But nothing matches peers and the experiences that peers can share because that stuff is real. It's what's actually working. And I like, I think it is. If my content does land with some people, I think it's because just that, it's just that it's not Jason's big ideas, it's the reflections of people who are actually doing this stuff. Like, I don't want you to steal my ideas. I want to help channel the ideas of like the smartest firms I talk to to you because that's, that's the real stuff. Right? But I can tell you, for most accountants who run firms in this day and age, like traditional firms, they don't have other friends who do the same. And as a result, they have this tunnel vision for just their own experience that's inherently limiting. And so if you can, like, if you can, you can somehow get these folks connected with other people that you look up to, that makes such a big difference. And that starts with like, for one, growing your network and meeting some, some other folks and learning how they're doing things. But oftentimes, like most firm owners are more than happy to hop on a call with another firm firm owner to talk through how they're doing. Xyz like, oh, I heard you change from practice. Yes. To this other thing. Do you mind just like giving us a peek into the setup and telling us the traps to avoid? Most people, like, they super enjoy talking shop with other people who do the very specific thing that they do. And so there's oftentimes a greater willingness to share than you may expect. And if you're trying to bring people around to a different point of view, that's the very best way that you can do it, is expose them to the people who are having success with the direction that you're trying to take things. So that's kind of my first tip for anyone that's frustrated with this element of change and how do I get everybody going in the same direction? In some ways a four partner firm, that's a lot of inertia. In other ways that's microscopic. Like in the grand scheme of accounting firms that are out there, this may feel like an insurmountable thing, but like this stuff happens. Like it is possible to initiate change on any scale. Now in this firm, one thing this person appreciates is by and large they say they enjoy free rein to handle clients how they see fit and develop those relationships kind of however they see, you know, the, or I guess they're giving given latitude to do that however they want to do that. And most of the time this is because like these four partners, they kind of got to put a finger on, on who's going to fund their retirement. And so if you are a high achiever and if you're a non owner and you listen to my content, by default, you're a high achiever. And so somebody that's wired that way and talks that way and even takes an interest in the talking shop of running a firm and all likely the partners are looking at you as okay, like, we got to keep this person kind of on a track to ensure that when I want to be done, they can come in, they can, they can buy my clients, whatever that looks like. And there's, there's a ton of you in this position that listen to this podcast. That was where I was at one point in my journey. Remember that your say matters. You actually have more leverage than you think you do. In fact, the only reason I ended up getting anything that I wanted in my firm and buying folks out and all that was I was like, I'm either going to leave or we're going to do this. And when push came to shove, like we found a way for everybody to kind of make that work. But the good news is you have flexibility to kind of choose your own path here and do things the way that you want to do them. Which means you can start all this by leading by example. And so it's going to take time, whatever your vision is for how to run a firm that is going to take time to bring people around to and you can expose them to thought leadership and other firms, people doing the things that you're into. But like the really compelling version of that is also going to be you just doing it and people seeing the success that comes from that. And when I was in your shoes, I think maybe the biggest like bottom line, just huge upgrade to our firm that I was able to push out across a number of partners that started with a smaller scale tests on my clients and in my little domain was moving away from hourly billing. And this is, this is point number two. And this may feel just like so foreign and so insurmountable and recognize that everybody else around you, if you go out and you say this tomorrow will be like, there is not a way to do that because if they're still on hourly billing, it's because they haven't seen a way off of that yet or they don't see other people doing it. And so that's completely understandable that you may have a vision for how to get off of hourly billing and they don't yet that they won't like. This is part of why we have to expose them to, to new ways of thinking, lead by example on smaller scale tests with our own clients, but also wherever possible, expose them to other firms for whom this is second nature. There's so much of the thinking that goes into our firm that is like set in stone. It's like bundled up and kind of this hairball of assumptions that we hold. But you can literally go across the street to another firm and like, it's like you're living in a completely different reality. And, and this is a really powerful thing to discover because it just makes you more aware of how you box yourself in with all these assumptions. And the more you talk with different types of firm owners, the bigger the world seems actually and the more flexibility you feel like you have instead of being boxed in by today's client's expectations and staff and all that. Hey. This episode is sponsored in part by Canopy, one of my top recommended practice management systems. Because Canopy, it does a lot, man. And it doesn't just do, it doesn't just try really hard. It does it nicely. Like it looks like a, a well built product, thoughtfully designed. Because man who cloud practice management systems, there was a window there like five to seven years where it wasn't that and Canopy was like one of the only companies to come out of that generation of practice management tools was something that was like really modern, super slick and like somehow it's threaded the needle of being actually one of only two practice management systems I recommend for firms 50 employees and above, but it's still actually one of the very best ones for itty bitty firms too. And to somehow do both of those things in a product is like exceptionally hard. But they've somehow stuck the landing on that canopy. If you're out and about at conferences this year, you're gonna see Canopy there. And that matters a lot to me because if they're rocking up at conferences, they're having a lot of conversations with accounting accountants. With accountants they understand your needs like to a level of depth a lot of folks don't that don't make that same investment into like spending time with accountants. We've done some demos of Canopy on my YouTube channel and if you want to take a peek at what they look like, you could be impressed. But to learn more about Canopy, check out the link down in the show notes. Today's episode is sponsored in part by Teamup, who helps you hire talented accountants directly in the Philippines. You ever wondered how much it would cost to hire a senior accountant? That is what do you pay a senior accountant in the Philippines on an ongoing basis Senior accountant just so we're on the same page, somebody who can like manage the entire end end accounting process. Post all the closing entries. In fact here's the profile of a senior accountant team up recently placed into a firm that a bachelor's in accounting where a certified public accountant which is a Philippines certification bill.com and QuickBooks certified 6 1/2 years experience in accounting over 5 years experience with US firms experience managing, training and reviewing the work of junior team members. Doesn't that sound nice? Proficient with QuickBooks 0 buildcom rippling gusto expensify a salary 2000 bucks a month the normal range for a senior accountant in the Philippines between 1700 and 20$200 USD per month buddy accounting it's a global language really is doesn't matter if you got butts in the seats and the land of the free or in somebody else's land accounting's accounting to learn more actually could swipe Team Up's whole salary guide that they just made. It's really good. I'll link that down in the show notes. So just from a really practical standpoint, how do you get your firm off of hourly billing especially if you are a really more of a volume shop like this one is. So for perspective they're minimum for 1040s which is individual tax returns 500 bucks a year now 500 bucks a year in 2025 that is like retail tax pricing. If somebody walks into an H R block, that's more or less the median of what you're going to pay a service like that, if not more. And the nature of your business, like the number of really senior people that you have on payroll, very difficult to make. I mean you can make money these days. It's hard not to make money in an accounting firm, but it's far from the optimized way of making money like when you add in the fact they're also doing a large volume of payroll. So Payroll, they charge $50 per pay period plus a $5.25 per checker or direct deposit fee with a $275 annual W2 fee. So basically 50 bucks per pay period plus 525 per employee payment. So fixed margins on that. Not much more than what many software platforms are actually charging for the same thing. And, and they've got four and a half payroll folks on staff just doing payroll. Let's be clear, you are doing that as a service to your clients. That's not really a money making endeavor. Endeavor Medium pricing for business returns is between 750 and 1250 with some larger clients coming in around 1500 to $2500. So let's just level set here. Entry level pricing for federal return only on TurboTax Live. Full service. This is TurboTax doing your small business tax return for you. Federal only starts at 1750. Most of our small business tax returns are coming in between 750 and 1250. This is a big opportunity for your biggest referral partner to become TurboTax. I mean we could be, we could be super savage here and chop everything at that 1750 level and say anything. We're charging less than this. Hey, you're going to go over to TurboTax and then we'll see you back here in a year when you get about 20% as high level of service and 20% of the expertise. Now we can't do that. Why can't we do that? Because it's our fault that we're in this situation. They mention they're increasing minimums 10% a year. That's not enough. If you're, if you're in a tough spot, that's just not enough to catch you up with the market. And right now TurboTax is coming for all of our lunch monies. And I guarantee you, like you wouldn't feel good about referring clients to TurboTax because you know you're going to have a crappy experience yet. We can't see, like we can't justify charging as much as them. Obviously that, that needs to be rectified. Right. And for the person who's like, how do I take up this fight with, with everybody else in my firm, whether you're a partner or a staff person, you, you just gotta paint that whole picture for them. So right now go out and look at and so this isn't Turbo Tax, like the product that someone goes and DIYs their tax. This is TurboTax for small business. And I think it's called full service. It is an actual accountant, a tax accountant doing that work for you. It's the most similar thing to working with a firm, but you will never build a relationship with that individual because you're not gonna work with the same person year over year. More of that workload in general is, is put on you because with a service like TurboTax, they're generally just going to be plugging in whatever numbers you give them. Most accounting firms, like you're going to be doing bookkeeping, cleanup, like you're actually making sure that things are correct. That's a much more senior level of service. But, but we're still not charging as much as TurboTax. And the way that I got out from, from under this in my firm, besides two years of, of pretty drastic price increases. And that came with some clients leaving, but not as many as we expected, which is a very common theme if you talk with folks that end up having to do kind of extreme price increases. And to be clear, that's hard. That sucks for a number of reasons. It sucks because you don't want to tick off your, your, your clients. It sucks because you don't know how many people will leave and you're worried that's going to be a risk to the business. But the reason it really sucks for most of us that we usually don't acknowledge is because we know it's our fault. And it's, it's an admission of we have been doing this wrong and this can oftentimes be the biggest blocker. So some really hard changes to be made there. But where does the rubber hit the road? For me it hit the road by moving away from hourly billing to fixed fee billing and three tier proposals for the first time. And right now, like if, if, if you want a way to frame this as a really easy win, it's that right now your four partners are actually doing a huge volume of billing. If every single project goes out the door with a time based invoice. That's actually a lot of work that you can't charge for the work of all that billing and the notion of like value pricing every single one of these projects, that's also a tremendous amount of work. Right. And so what we did was instead of going through every single one of these projects one by one, everybody on the team kind of had to get on board with the notion that we could price these projects in a more standardized way. And as long as we could trust that the portfolio of work would pencil out the same profit wise, in the end, we had to be okay with that. And that meant not splitting hairs over that one client being a little bit more this year or a little bit less than last year, this one client being a little more than the other client, or calling a couple, couple more times than the other client. And then we had to be okay not splitting hairs over all of that and instead trusting that more like at a client portfolio level, we would, we would come out in the same place. And at the end of the day, that's kind of all that matters. And if we want to split hairs, it's more on a level of like fairness, like, well, it's not fair that this client's more work than that client. And if you do have clients that are just like a pain and way more work, sure. Charge them more, send them packing, like, whatever makes the most sense. But this negotiation in my firm looked like, well, what's a threshold within which we can agree that we can just automatically bill this out at, you know, 15% more than it was last year, 8% more than it was last year, whatever it looks like. And within our firm, the partners agreed we would set the fees up front for this annual work. And I'll tell you more about how we landed at that fee. But we would set the fees up front and we would not manually bill it if it was within 90 to 130% of, of what the fees were last year. And so that's like the whip calculation hours, times, hourly billing rate. Because this is still the paradigm that these folks are living in. Whether you agree with that or not, it's still the way they're going to do the mental math of how profitable is this project. And there's, there's a hundred ways you can try to like 200 IQ this to be like, well, they shouldn't even be thinking that way to begin with. Change, like in a, in a firm like this is gradual. It's step by step. And the first step is, is proving like that this can Work with some easy wins. And it's not until that first step is taken that they can get their head around the second step. And so the first step can be as simple as, let's look at all the work that we did last year and this is mainly talking about like once a year tax work. If we look at the whole business, what's a percentage increase? We would be okay with let's say 14 over last year. So next year, before we do the work, we're going to send out a proposal where the pricing is set at 114 of what it was the prior year and we will bill it out that way. That's what we will get paid unless the whip at the end of the project is less than 90% of what it was last year or more than 130% of what it was last year. And when I made this change across 1800 projects in my firm, I think it was 3% of projects that fell outside of that range that then went to a fallback where somebody had to reassess the scope and do some manual work. That meant across 1800 projects, nobody had to build out work. They saved a tremendous amount of time as a result. And the business ended up in the exact same place. In fact, in a business with multiple stakeholders, they ended up in a more aligned space. Because if you don't do this stuff across the board, some people will be gung ho about it, other people won't be gung ho about it. And you'll have clients that will get either too good of a deal or not enough of a good deal, depending on who they work with. And then you got your clients running around like, like kids asking mom for something dad wouldn't let you, wouldn't let you have. And obviously you don't want that. So if you're looking for, like, how do I baby step out of this hourly billing paradigm? Focus on the benefits here. Wouldn't it be nice if you didn't have to manually bill all your projects anymore? We could agree up front on the range that these projects have to come in to be auto billed. In fact, don't even call it value billing. Call it like auto billing because the partners don't have to bill it manually. And you can agree to an acceptable range that projects have to fall within for it to even apply. And for your clients, they get the benefit of seeing the pricing upfront. So you eliminate the risk of getting to the end of a project and the client being like, oh, I didn't want to pay this to begin. With that's how I got an 80 year old firm with a bunch of really old traditional partners off of hourly billing. Now, in some ways, is that still hourly billing? Like yeah, kind of, sorta. But once you get to that place and you're using a proposal platform for the first time, you can do other really cool things. Like let's always take a payment method upfront so that actually as soon as the project's done, we simply charge that payment method for the amount that the client already agreed to upfront. Right. Like you've completely eliminated, eliminated air at that point and a whole bunch of administrative procedures that happen after the project is done. Another really cool thing that becomes possible that we've been talking about a lot on the podcast lately is going to three tier proposals. So like, there's a very basic version of this where you just put one option in front of the client and it's, you know, 14% more than whatever the price was that they paid last year. The cooler version of that is a three tier proposal that better captures a client's willingness and ability to pay. Because while many clients are annoyed at what your prices are already and they want to pay you less, most of us have just as many clients who are tickled with what we do and would even pay a little more. And by giving them several options, you let your clients self select into who would be willing to pay more versus who wants to stay down at the very bottom bronze tier. That becomes really good information for firing clients down the road and understanding who values you the most and who doesn't. But that's not possible until we get away from just the very rudimentary sort of hourly billing paradigm. Now you start thinking down that path, maybe you run a firm or you're in a firm that still is hourly billing. That sounds like a monumental thing. What I just explained was like 18 months of crap and details compressed into like 10 minutes. All the, all the red flags that go up. What about these weird kind of outlier projects that don't make sense for that they'll start with the outlier projects. Doing this across a thousand clients at once, that seems really risky. I didn't start with a thousand clients. I actually started with 1099 projects. Was the very first time that we did that and it went really, really well. We always had the problem of not knowing do clients want us to do their 1099 or not. And this was the way that they opted into it by completing this proposal process. And that went better than we thought it would. I had Been running all of my clients through this methodology. And so I showed the other partners kind of how this worked and they were like, yeah, I could see that. Because at one point they were like, what do you mean you never bill? I'm like, I don't, I don't bill. It just goes out the door. So it didn't start with like the big ambitious version of that, but by leading by example and finding what you can get common ground around, which is I would love it if I didn't have to spend all this time billing people. And if you can assure me that I'm going to make the same money in the end, then yeah, I probably don't need to care. That's something that most people can get around. At least that was what worked in my case. But then that's kind of, that's kind of the gateway drug because as soon as you're off of hourly billing, all sorts of other stuff becomes possible. Even taking deposits upfront if you wanted to. But at the very least auto billing at the end just pulling the funds because the clients already agreed to the price. Then you get into three tier proposals, which is like kind of an immediate boost to the bottom line because you have all these clients opting up to, to pay you more. And when done right, they're paying you more at a greater multiple than the increased effort that needs to go into that work. If the gold package is, is 2x the price of the bronze package, the gold package should not be 2x the effort or the time of the bronze package. The analogy we come back to is like economy versus first class. On an airplane, if first class costs four times as much, usually it costs about two times as much to serve that customer. And on a plane, that's how they make money is those first class customers. You have first class clients right now. But as long as we ask everybody to pay the same price, we don't give them the option to self select into paying us for a more premium service delivery. But that, that's not possible as long as you're doing hourly billing, right? Can you tell this is something that I like sweated over for like five to seven years. This firm is just like, it is a spitting image of the firm that I ultimately bought. Today's episode is sponsored in part by Cloud accountant staffing. Their backstory. They were actually an accounting firm that started hiring accountants in the Philippines. They just started doing it for some of their friends and now they will do it for you, comma friend. They help you hire talented accountants in The Philippines, because they've got recruiters on the ground there pulling from what is actually an increasingly powerful finance workforce in the Philippines. All of the big four offices have, like, huge offices over there. Any type of talent you can hire in the US you can hire in the Philippines as well. But when you start out, you're gonna have all these ignorant questions and the stuff you're even afraid to ask, like, how do I even get them a computer to work on? Do they work on their own and VPN into mine? Do I send them a computer? What about, like, power outages, Internet outages? Like team building? How does any of that stuff work? I can tell you the mistake that I made is I got stuck on those things for like two or three years and tried to think through all these solutions. How am I going to do my disclosures and all that? Gang, that's like half of the value of these services is they've walked so many accounting firms through this. Stop trying to guess what the right way is to do it. Let them tell you what has actually worked and not worked for other firms. They will hold your hand through it like it's the reason that these services exist. So if you're considering it, like, just hop on a call with them to learn, you got nothing to lose. At the very least, you'll come away with, like, some new ideas and thoughts on how this stuff actually works. Highly recommend having a chat with them to learn more about cloud account staffing. Check out the link 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 because it's. It's icky. You let things slide. You don't get paid. You waste time. Waste time chasing people for money. That's not what I did. I would just. I didn't want to waste time chasing them and so I would just. I just eat it. Don't do that. This is where Ignition comes in. The leading revenue generation platform for accounts and professional services. When I was running my firm, Ignition wiped out our ar, it's true. And significantly reduced the time spent billing clients, saving our partners over a thousand hours in the first year. Because I have to build all that stuff manually. Man. With the condition. We want 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 my over 7,000 of the smartest businesses run on ignition@ignitionapp.com put a link in the show notes There's a long list of other things you can do in this in this firm. The reality is you can only bite off so many things at a time. But like five to seven year challenges I would be looking at, I'd probably sell the payroll business. I'm not making any money on it right now. The reality is you're doing it as a service to your clients because they want all that stuff under one roof. With the right partner, you can still make it feel like it's all under one roof, but your organizational focus will be much greater if you're not having to do that payroll stuff. And in all likelihood you can repurpose those payroll people into more bookkeeping work, even even getting into some income tax work. It's just something that's not additive to the business in all likelihood. So I'd probably try to get rid of it. As you know, on the podcast, I had really good luck hiring folks offshore. A number of themes in this. It's been very hard for them to hire good enough accountants. Processes are breaking down because they don't have experienced enough accountants. This came up like three or four times in what they submitted. This is a great example of why I don't see offshore hiring as displacing, say junior level onshore folks. I also don't see hiring both of those as being mutually exclusive. Like hiring offshore doesn't mean that I'm not developing talent onshore. My experience is, is what they're explaining here where no matter what they did, like they couldn't find the people that they needed. And a unfortunate byproduct of this is that the team that you have isn't able to then grow into more senior skills. My experience pulling offshore folks into my firm was initially some fear, some trepidation from the team as much as we try to explain the plan. But very quickly that flipped into the staff being like, dang this, this actually has unblocked me from going out and doing these more, more valuable tasks that we've talked about for years. But we couldn't find the right people to pull in to free me of them. The folks on our offshore team were also just like really freaking good. And anytime you have a teammate that comes in, regardless of who they are, that's really good. Makes your life easier. That's just everybody can get excited about that. In a firm like this, with multiple partners, you're doing some sort of resource pooling. And that in my opinion works especially well for offshore stuff. Another thing you could tackle your practice, the business that you're building, the clients you're serving, building that around a remote practice for the first time. Right now everybody here is in an office and that's just inherently hard to do. It makes the hiring problem even worse. But you being able to lead by example, how to build a distributed team, this is what I did in my firm. My firm was a fully in person firm. I built the first remote practice when I built out the cast practice for the first time. And it was not something that anybody buddy would have understand or believed was really possible until I had sort of led by example there. Those are all things you could do down the road. But if there's one other thing like that is the most obvious workflow or tech change that would make your life easier. A number of times in this submission they mentioned the pain of tax intake. Yeah, two or three times it's mentioned here. It's also what they least enjoy having to manage the tax intake process. If you look at the fees, what they charge 1040 starting at 500 bucks, businesses coming in between 750 and 1250, you're doing a large volume of tax work. And this cheap tax work oftentimes 50% of the work of a $500 1040 is intake, if not more than 50%. It's chasing them down for all those little details that you need. It becomes a really big part of the project. And you've heard me just rail on it a lot. This is the fastest moving tech in tax is these tax intake tools. And so the leaders right now, Stanford Tax Sorban, Safe Send is good as well. More on the automated delivery side, but they just got acquired by Thomson Reuters, so. So time will tell how that one pencils out. But of all of the ways to juice up your tax workflow, where Safe Send is really good on say automated delivery, the two best solutions that are best for intake, better than Safe Send right now is Stanford Tax and Sorban. And it's on that intake like bit of the process, basically everything before it gets entered into the tax software. That's where most firms will see the most time savings from a new piece of software. Especially this type of firm where you're doing a large volume of tax. So I would tell you, run out, do some testing on Sorban, on Stanford Tax, for this gathering functionality, you're going to pay between 15 and $30 a tax return, which isn't too astronomical, but also hurts on cheap 1040s, like a $100 1040. If you're paying $25 for an intake tool, that's outrageous, right? But the thing is, the price of that intake tool is still going to be $25 if that's a $1,000 1040 or a $10,000 1040. And so sometimes we have to think about whether using these tools accelerates our path to being that more premium firm, because that software cost per return is fixed. But you can see a world where you're doing this very, very cheap work. But you can't get off that hamster wheel because you can't afford the tech that will automate the manual stuff that's filling the days of your team. And that's why oftentimes this is an investment that's worth making. It's even if today it feels like a lot of your margin. The bigger question is, will this accelerate my path to doing this work in a more profitable way? The answer is oftentimes yes. So while this, this firm, like, desperately needs a modern practice management system, not Thompson Roadie's practice cs, the bigger place where you'll see an immediate benefit is with a tax intake tool. And the time to implement this is actually right now the worst time you can implement it. Not the worst time, because it's still better than nothing. But the trap many of us fall into is not doing it until the end of the year. But then you're going into like January, February, March on something that's brand new and not really dialed in, so you don't get the full benefit. So right now, as you still have clients that are trickling information in that will get filed closer to extension season, pick up a tax intake tool, learn how it works, see where it's great, where it's still lacking. And then when it comes time for next tax season, like, you're going to have it nailed down. You're going to totally understand what it does and doesn't do. I have a huge amount of respect for folks and firms like this because I spent so many years in this where I had such clear visions and was so enthusiastic about what the right and better way was to do this all. And I know so well the feeling of everybody else just not getting it. Why do they just, why do they not see the world the same way that I do? And in hindsight, it was because I was hanging out at like a totally different type of water cooler than they were. I was talking and jamming on ideas with other firm owners on social media and learning from them. Whereas my partners, they didn't have that perspective. They were doing what almost every accounting firm is doing. They'll go to work, they would do accounting, they would work too many hours and then they go home. And their, their universe, they just kind of had tunnel vision for their own firm and how they had done it for decades. And so it wasn't reasonable for me to expect them to have the same perspectives that they would because they just hadn't been exposed to the same things. That's kind of, there's actually a lot of aspects of the human experience that, that kind of come back to that same. Well, we don't, we don't have the same experience, so we don't see things the same way. The same is absolutely true of accounting firm running. Thanks for your submission here. What sort of firm do you run? Like, the more different these episodes are, the more interesting they are because they kind of round out our decision making framework for how I would coach another firm, how I would make this decision in my firm under kind of these given circumstances. The more we get exposed to this stuff, the better that decision making framework you have is. And if this would be helpful for you, we'll put a link to the form down in the show notes, pop some details in there. We can do your firm next. Any other thoughts you got for this firm, pop them down in the comments. And thanks for coming and hanging today.