476 This $2M Niche Accounting Firm Generates $1M In Cash Per Year

This is not a test. Today we're looking at a niche accounting firm, single owner, about $2 million a year, top line, million dollars a year, bottom line. It's kind of the dream. We'll talk about what they're doing different from most firms, how they got there, because it's the perfect business. It is. It really is. Imagine being. Wow, it's almost too. Okay. If you're new here, welcome to the podcast. We talk about running accounting firms about $10 million and under. What we're talking about today is a firm who's anonymously submitted their information to me. It's called Roast Affirm. There's a link to the form down in the show notes if you want to have your firm roasted. Basically, we talk about their firm, how they got to where they are and give them a few ideas for kind of next steps with this firm. We're going to talk about, number one, the numbers. Cause that's arguably the most interesting thing here. Number two, how they got here from a sales and marketing standpoint because the what's making this possible is the positioning of the firm. Three, we'll talk about the team they've built, number four, pricing, five, the tech they're using, and six, the pains they're still struggling with today. So starting with the numbers, they do 2 million a year, top line. They say 80% of their revenue is from bookkeeping work, 10% from tax prep, 10% from advisory. The reality is they are just an accounting department in a box and only doing tax prep for the business clients that they work with and the individuals who are the owners of that business, they do a bit of advisory on top of the accounting department stuff, but not as much as they would like. So by and large, this is kind of the hip, modern, on trend accounting firm that has moved away from standalone tax work and functions as kind of the accounting department for a small business. Now, I don't have full financials here, but I'll let you back into the math. So they're doing 2 million a year, top line. Here's the makeup of their team. We've got a single owner, but then we've got seven accountants, one tax preparer, one tax preparer, one CEO, one onboarding specialist, one accounting manager, one EA and one outsourced developer. That's a team of 13. Seven of those are accountants. I think your payroll is probably coming in about a million bucks or just under. So this firm for the single owner, they may not quite be clearing a million in cash, but they're very, very close. To it. And actually like, what we're going to talk about today is there's actually a tremendous amount of room to improve. Believe it or not. What you almost feel bad saying like, who are any of us to be like, oh no, let me tell you everything that you're doing wrong in your firm. But I think you'll see like there is even more they can do here. But, but let's talk about number two, marketing and how they've positioned their firm because that's what's made this all possible. So the firm is in a probably tier 3 city, like decent sized market, but they're working with firms all over the US they are 98% niched, so 98% of their work is within the grocery space. So they work with grocery stores. Clients are all over the country, mix of small town and city clients. Everyone needs groceries, exclamation point. Here's the cool thing. Here's how they get a consistent inflow of clients. This is from their submission. Every grocery store in our niche is required by the quote franchisor. That word's not accurate legally, but paints the picture. Every grocery store is required to take a finance and accounting class at their HQ before getting a store. This person is flown in by the franchisor to teach that class. So they have to see them before they get a store. It's free advertising for their firm with a 70% conversion rate. Plus they get tons of referrals within the community. And future store owners train at their clients stores. Basically, clients are exposed to them four to five times before they hire them. So the close is usually done in one phone call. Most of the clients have two month lead time from our first contact before they open and begin paying us. I mean, you want to talk about a great end to building a client list. I mean there you have it. They're, I mean they're not even positioned as the exclusive provider for this sort of chain of grocery stores. But they go in and they teach all the folks that operate these stores how to do it. And so you become the default option. And that's what we talk about on the podcast so much is we think in order to quote unquote niche down or, or be the best in the space, you have to be the quote unquote best. And because of that we get all uncomfortable with like, well, I don't know this and I don't know that. The reality is the folks that went inside a niche, they're the ones who are the most visible, whatever that means for that space. Whether that's social media. Whether that's like, you've partnered with all the consultants, whether that's, you know, you're sponsoring the newsletters or the podcasts or whatever it is that these people consume. In this case, we have this, like, choke point of every single person has to go through this one funnel to be able to run a store. And you've weaseled your way into teaching them the accounting and tax class. So you become the default option. It's not mandatory. And there are some franchisers who, like, will actually do a deal with firms to make them being the service provider mandatory. And it can even sometimes be built into the fees that are paid to the franchisor. And you get paid from the franchisor directly. That's a little less common. But I had a, like, the early stage of a couple of these where we got in with the franchisor for a couple different types of retail businesses. And I mean, getting those clients, it's. It's like fish in the world. And we are always like accountants on the other side. And this happens in pretty much any type of most types of small business specialization. You're like, well, it's all the same. Like, it's really not that different. So what's the point of even specializing to begin with? The point of it isn't for your expertise to change necessarily, though, as you get into it. I do think there is aspects of how you deliver the service that are more impactful and they're more specific, but the point is the perception of the buyer, and that is what it is. Like, we may not agree with it, but it is what it is. And so for these folks, they think the default option, like, it's this firm absent some other, you know, clear path or an alternative in the market that they're aware of. Assuming you're not, you know, a total jerk in this sort of course that you run them through, they're probably just going to default to you. Man, that is. That is the power of specificity, but the risk there. So, like, let's just outline the fears and all the reasons why people don't do this one. Well, what about when that dries up? What about when you no longer teach that course? Well, I mean, you've already got a $2 million business that generates a million bucks a year. Not a bad place to find yourself in. You're still getting referrals from the community. But sure, maybe that's a risk. Another concern many people have. What if I get bored of serving this type of clients? Ugh. If I get bored of just talking groceries all day, man. Well, again, you still have a $2 million accounting firm that generates a million dollars a year. Even if you wanted to get out from under it, you could sell it. A third main concern here is with niching down is usually, well, what if the industry kind of goes belly up? Groceries feels unlikely, but in my experience, when you niche down, you actually find a lot of cool sort of adjacent opportunities as well as you build that network. All of those people, if an industry dies, they usually move on to something else. And those connections, like there's still, there's now new ways to use those connections oftentimes, even if the very worst case scenario did come to a head. But that seems exceedingly unlikely. And along the way, you've got a pretty darn good business that's generating a lot of money. So let's talk about number three, the makeup of their team. I'll give that to you again. They've got seven accountants, one tax preparer, one CEO, one onboarding specialist, one accounting manager, one EA was the. So is that two tax preparers. The EA must be their more senior tax preparer and then one outsourced developer. This isn't counting the owner. And if there's one thing that stands out here, I would say in a team of 13, it's the fact that you've still got the owner who's really the 14th person and you've got a COO. So at 14 people, you have two, no, three non client facing roles because they've got an outsourced developer. I mean, I just saw someone on LinkedIn the other day who is like, they'd acquired several firms and it's like a, I can't remember what it is, $4 million group now or something like that. And they were kind of sharing some, some of what's working and what's not working. And the owner's still doing client work. And I'm like, and their ambition is to do more acquisitions. And I'm like, you just, you gotta draw the line, figure out how to build a business that doesn't require you to service it. And they're like, they're like, we can't quite justify yet having someone who's not in a client facing role. And this is a $4 million firm. You compare that to like, you know, we had, we had Chad Davis on the podcast last year who, you know, had built a virtual firm in Canada to over a hundred employees and now they're sitting around 50 or 60. And I had him Kind of draft his org chart from the first hire. And Chad, just the way that that guy is wired, he's pretty much out of client work as soon as possible. And when they built their firm live ca I think by employee 10 both he and his partner were totally out of client work. So to tell yourself we're not to the size yet where we can justify not having a client facing person, it can be a bit of a trap because that, that like goal line can sort of get further away the further down the tracks you get. It's just. It's a question of priorities. It's a question of how much value do you assign to your own time. I think we have to be aware of the fact that we will perpetually undervalue our own time when the only for like if you're a single owner firm, by and large the thing that's really going to be the biggest needle mover for the firm is the time that you spend not doing client work. It's the time that you spend in repositioning the firm or figuring out how to attract a better client or the next really important hire in the business. It's not putting out that client fire but like if you just kind of sit back and let the day sort of take you where it wants to take you, that's what you end up doing until the end of time. Before you know it, you can sink decades into just chasing your tail solving everybody else's problems. Besides that team, makeup wise, nothing here super surprising. Besides the fact they have three non client facing folks in a team of 14 including the owner, one accounting manager, over seven accountants. That's quite a. That's. That's probably going to need another accounting manager there soon. Outsourced developer. They never really got into what they're doing, but they did say that all employees are full time and they don't believe in part timers. Feels like somebody hurt them in a very specific way. I'm assuming all are onshore. Having seven onshore accountants. Reality is that's an expensive way of getting bookkeeping done these days. So if it's me, I'd probably be moving some of that stuff offshore. That by extension honestly creates more opportunities for my onshore team getting them out of some of the more basic stuff. Today's episode is sponsored in part by Client Hub, the practice management system that delivers WOW seasons year round, not busy seasons. Seasons that will dazzle your clients for two reasons. One, Client Hub is drop dead simple man. If you're too tired of a practice management system that just feels like you gotta have a PhD in learning something new. Client Hub. You hop in, the vibes are great, it just all makes sense. But two remember, there's a second reason ClientHub offers a game changing client experience. That is you can actually get clients to like collaborate with you and be helpful on the platform because the portal wasn't this like afterthought. Bolt on now. Very cool. Recent development in Client Hub Magic Books review Twinkle sounds so Client Hub syncs in the transactions from your QuickBooks file. You can run an AI analysis on it, like from inside of Client Hub. It'll highlight any potential issues you can mark. Like on the balance sheet and the P and L. You mark each account one by one, whether or not it's been reviewed. But if you want to troubleshoot, it'll pull you straight back into QuickBooks like so you don't have to learn like a whole new troubleshooting tool. If you'd rather sort that stuff out in QuickBooks. Other cool stuff it'll identify automatically. Expense inconsistencies, purchases without a payee, purchases in parent accounts. Why is, why can't we not disable that QuickBooks Large transactions, new accounts, new vendors, new customers. It's magic Books Review inside of ClientHub. I think you might like it. Learn more about ClientHub. Check out the link down in the show notes. This episode is brought to you in part by makershub, who helps you automate your accounts payable department with AI. There's still such a huge percentage of businesses today that rely on like manual approvals, even paper processes and stamps and all that stuff. That's because most accounts payable products do not give you like the level of detail in your approval processes that you need. Maker's Hub got a bunch of flexibility here from separating bill approval from payment approval, because oftentimes those are two different groups of people that need to manage that. But when you can't separate those approval workflows, you end up kind of like fudging. Well, this person's got the keys to the castle, but we'll let them improve this bill because they're the only one that can make the payment. But they may not actually know anything about the bill. By separating out your bill approvals and your payment approvals, but also being able to drive these workflows based on any little fiddly item on the bill, this is where they're using like AI vision models and large language models to extract better information from bills than we've ever had before. Having that flexibility Then in the approval process we are like saving loads of time by using AI to automate extraction and then having a greater level of control over approvals. Super powerful tool makers Hub would help so many of my clients that had like hairy ugly AP workflows. To learn more about that one, check out the link down in the show notes. Let's talk about number four, pricing. How much do you think it costs to have this accounting firm be the accounting department in a box for your grocery store? And to be clear, like the scope of what they're doing for folks, they're not doing like bill pay and stuff like that. They are just by and large doing the accounting. Here we go. Let's get some more context on that. Clients submit monthly docs through their portal. The accountant reconciles records accruals work paper sales tax filings. Okay, goes to the manager for. Oh no, they record sales tax filings. I don't think they do the sales tax filings. Goes to a manager for financial review and then they do the tax prep once a year. So bookkeeping, by and large it's bookkeeping. But for a grocery store, and these are good, like the chain that this is, these are decent sized grocery stores. These aren't little itty bitty things. If you had to guess what they charged for this per month, I bet that you would guess more than $700 a month. Right. And this is where like of everything that I see here, when I say it's a $2 million practice, they're clearing a million bucks a year. Do any of us have any business saying here's what you can do better? If there's anything that stood out to me, it's this. 700 bucks a month. When you're a specialized provider, these are decent sized businesses, not super high margin businesses, but 700, 700amonth. Man, that feels cheap for me. Couple other price points. They mentioned 1500 dollars a month minimum for non grocery niche. So 98% of their revenue is in the grocery space. They got a few projects outside of that. They charge a thousand bucks for business tax prep. You know that's cheap. Okay, actually let me climb, climb atop my soapbox here. When TurboTax is done for you, small business tax prep service federal only costs sixteen hundred dollars. If you are the expert, the niche pro prepping their tax return, it shouldn't be cheaper than TurboTax. Right? Interesting that they've broken out the price from the flat monthly for bookkeeping stuff. Usually that all gets rolled up together, but I could take it or leave it there's there are downsides to that because then when the tax work is part of the monthly engagement like the biggest point of confusion as well somebody leaves midway through the year what have they paid for tax wise and what have they not paid for. So there's an argument to do that both ways. And then for personal tax prep, 300 bucks. But they say tax prep prices kept low for annual monthly fee relationship. So I dunno maybe they had people I maybe they were charging more. Cause you can't. You can get tax work stupid cheap. Maybe they were charging more and people would say like oh you do my bookkeeping but I'm gonna go over here and have somebody else do my tax work. I would say if you're going to like underprice the tax work it's yet another argument for the ongoing bookkeeping being a little more premium. But I know anything I say here like I've just gotta be real careful because they're doing great. You know. This is called Roast Affirm though that's the format. Let's talk tech. What are they using to get this stuff done? By and large is QBO. They have six, six clients still on QuickBooks Desktop Eye Roll emoji. They're using Intuit Pro Connect for tax work. Monday.comAirtable JotForm Share File Suite- Interesting glaring omission here is probably Keeper. So month end close automation platform Keeper is kind of the best a place to automate a large volume of month end closes right now by and large there's also not an accounting industry specific practice management system. So for bookkeeping firms usually you would be looking to say a client hub Client hubs like a bookkeeping friendly practice management system otherwise getting into more of the the kind of the bigger dogs you'd be looking at like a carbon down in the show notes you've got all of my app recommendations like for specific types of firms and all that But I'd say the biggest things you're missing here a month end close automation platform and you're using non accounting vertical tech. My counter like my argument against the Monday.coms of the world and all that stuff and regular listeners I'm a broken record here. I want to put my firm on something that is solving nuanced problems and continuing to get better. The ceiling for how much a tool can help me for an accounting industry specific tool is much much higher than a generic tool. And Keeper is a great example of a piece of software that has pushed that ceiling higher. So Keeper it sinks in Every single transaction from the accounting ledger. So you can manage the whole month end close in a single platform alongside all of your other client. Month end closes, basically you reconcile the bank inside of QuickBooks, they never have to get back in there. All the quality assurance review, all that stuff happens in a single platform. And that's not something that Monday.com is ever going to do. Right. Same argument I use for folks who will like, you know, manage in the entirety of month end closes and say a big old spreadsheet workbook with a bunch of tabs. You can get away with doing that. And that unlocks some different kind of opportunities, flexibility wise, but it's not actively improving unless you figure out ways to improve it. As opposed to hitching my wagon to a company where all they're doing is month end close automation. Like they've got entire teams of people trying to squeeze everything that they can out of that rather than going out and hacking together my own thing with Monday.com that's probably what the developer is spending time with because Monday.com does have ways that you can kind of extend it in customizable ways. The trap here can be, and this is coming from a big time tech nerd where all my content started with Airtable and Zapier for accountants and how to do custom API calls and all that stuff. So I get all of that and I'm a big time nerd on all that stuff still. The problem was when I was the person running a business, that wasn't the best use of my time and I could certainly build some cool stuff, but then I would also end up playing software. Night janitor stuff would break. You wouldn't find out about it till later. You got to come in and fix stuff, troubleshoot things. When you're the owner of the firm, you can go out and hire, you know, an automation agency to help with that sort of thing if you really want to do it. And then they get to play night janitor. But it was yet another thing that was making demands of my time when the most important jobs I can do as a firm owner is working on the positioning of my firm and, and building out the team. Now there are like a hundred different ways to run a profitable firm. My advice comes through the lens of like, what do I see working for most or, or what? Like what do I, what platforms do I see firms becoming absolute raving fans of? That's the biggest thing that drives my recommendations. One other thing before I forget, like the secret sauce to this firm, what they're crushing Is their positioning is this niche opportunity that they've got into. We've got a whole playlist now of podcast episodes that get into building a niche client list from scratch. Regardless of where you are right now, this can kind of be the trap. If you're starting a new firm, you may be like, oh yeah, I'd do that if I was building from scratch. But even if you run a mature firm, like the first step to running a more profitable firm is just starting to attract a more specific type of client. I've got a whole playlist of podcast episodes now that'll give you a whole bunch of ideas for how to do that. You know, one thing we talk about a lot is like finding the hubs, the connectors in a space, being helpful to the consultants who are. You may have client list of 50 of the types of clients that you want to serve, but they need expertise from folks that can understand tax and how to run a back office and get the bookkeeping done and all the finance stuff efficiently. There's a bunch of sort of hubs in every space like that, and we go deep on that stuff in this playlist. Basically. What are, what are the easiest ways to get in front of a new type of client? If I can, if I can leave you with one thing, it is having a greater sense of agency in how you run an accounting firm. Rather than just sitting back and letting whatever comes in come in, or opening the floodgates and saying, I need the client so I have to take anything and everything. I want you to understand like just how much control you have over the type of clients you can attract with outputting a ton of effort in. I mean, most accountants put like zero effort into quote unquote marketing or positioning and so nothing happens. But with like a day of effort a week, you'll find it's actually way easier to attract a more specific type of client because you're for a specific type of person and those people will pay you way better than the general clients. But if you want some ideas, I'll link that, that playlist down in the show notes to get you some ideas. Last, the firm owner shared pains that they're working through right now. Number one is tax intake. They say we onboard 30 to 50 new clients a year and they don't pay great attention to our tax season webinar or email series. Lots of. I didn't see that email with very detailed color coded instructions. So they're not following your instructions for how to, how to do tax intake. We didn't Talk about this in the tech part because they're not doing a huge volume of 1040 individual tax work. I imagine intake for getting the business taxes done is pretty straightforward because you're doing all the books yourself. They're really just talking about personal tax work tax and take tools. A lot of really good options now from Sorben to Stanford Tax to Trust got some really, really good tools to take the pain out of collecting tax information for individual tax prep, even for non compliant clients. And we've talked about this before too. Like basically when you roll out a new approach to gathering information from clients, you just have to assume that they won't follow it unless you give them a ton of instruction. And so for example, if you want them to use this tax platform to submit their tax docs rather than just emailing them to you because that's not secure, then when they email you stuff, that's an opportunity to redirect them and re educate them and say like hey, this is great, thanks. But for security reasons, can you please submit that stuff to us here? Because this isn't a secure way to exchange information. And like 80% of people, once you give them that prompt once, they'll be like, oh yeah, no that's, that's totally fine. The reason they didn't change is that we're all just very habitual. We, we will default to doing things the way that we've always done them. But there are ways to gather that 1040 information more effectively. Now that would probably be my next tech recommendation would be a tool for that. Even though they don't do a huge volume of 1040 work. This episode is sponsored in part by Verito. New sponsor alert. Have you ever gotten that gut drop feeling when a server crashes right before an important deadline? Then just make your blood boil. If you've ever gone through tax season, let's zoom out. Any season of life with unreliable technology. You know just how much your tool crapping the bed at the wrong time. We just can't have it. Okay? That's why we're talking Verdot here today. Okay? You're getting your own dedicated servers. No shared resources, no noisy neighbors. Verito will even migrate you with zero downtime. Back it up with a 99.99. 9.9 uptime guarantee. No outages in nine years. That's impressive. I mean most of us can't say that. Think of the lowlights of the last nine years. More than 1400 US firms already trust VERDO to keep their deadlines on track. And Verdo they work with accounting firms so they get it. What are you rolling? Ultra Tax Drake Pro Series. They're going to get it done for you. It's going to be secure and it's not going to crap, crap the bed in March. Okay? Pardon my French. Get to a better hosting platform with Verito. Check out the link down in the show notes. This episode is brought to you in part by Financial Sense, the practice management system. If you've downloaded my app database, followed my app recommendations, Financial Sense has been one of my top recommended practice management systems for a while now. Financial Sense gives your team one place to track client work, assign tasks, follow up with those clients, run reports and hit those those ever so important deadlines. Thousands of firms use Financial Sense, including Fiscally professional Corporation, a 30 person accounting firm. Jessica Wong, a director of the firm, says Financial Sense gives us the post check we need, ensuring we stay on track. The checklist templates have standardized our onboarding process very effectively. It's good. And we've done a number of demos of Financial Sense on the YouTube channel. If you haven't seen it yet, right now, teams of two or more, you're gonna get 10% off the team or scale annual plan. Take Financial Sense for a spin four for free at the link down in the show notes. Second, pain is capacity. Our growth rate is naturally stressful. We're consistently working to out evolve our growing pains coming closer each year. I mean the easy answer here is just become the premium option. Like if you can't keep up with it, don't risk not serving the clients well. Become more premium so that instead of 70% of people coming to you, 50% of people are coming to you and they're paying 50% more like $700 a month, that's not a huge amount for bookkeeping. The obvious answer there, which is like an uncomfortable answer for folks, is price be more exclusive about who you work with. In a 50% margin firm, if you can charge 1050amonth instead of 700amonth, you just doubled your profit like for every client you can bring in at that level. So if they're charging $700 a month right now, we add 50% to that, that's 1050amonth. That's pure profit. If all the clients switched to that, which I mean it's probably, is probably isn't the right thing to do. But a lot of accounting firms have had to make really hard pricing decision changes in the last few years. If you said tomorrow that all of your $700 a month clients are now going to pay you 1050amonth. A shockingly small percentage of them would walk. You would maybe lose 10% of your clients, but your projects are twice as profitable at that point. So if nobody left, then you run a $3 million firm that clears $2 million a year. Now do you want to like do that, bait and switch on people? Like that's, that's probably not a great thing to do, right? But you can definitely see a world where you could baby step to, you know, 1050amonth instead of seven $700 a month over the course of a few years. And at that point, when your business is twice as profitable, you can handle doing half as much work if all you want to make is, is just a measly million dollars a year. And those capacity problems go straight out the window. But so many, so many firms are stuck on this how we can't keep up with all the volume of work that we have. And it's like, don't make this harder than it is. Not that it isn't emotionally taxing, but the answer is pretty obvious. It's interesting. And this person should have some healthy perspective. I don't know, it's hard to tell how, how deep into the client work they are. But I, for context, I had a 40 person firm. I came up through that firm and I was doing all the client work and by the end I was totally removed from client work and I was kind of the one non client facing guy. And when you're in the client work, managing the client relationship, you are intimately aware of like just how emotionally taxing any change like that can be because you're the one dealing with the brunt of it. And then on the other end of the spectrum, when you're removed from client work, you're out of touch with that emotional connection, right? Like you're, you're just this heartless person that just sees numbers on a spreadsheet, right? Me getting out of the client relationships, that was actually really, really helpful. Because when every single person in your accounting firm is in the client relationship, you are all emotional. You just can't not be. Like, if you care for these people, you just, you just can't not be. But that doesn't lead to good business decisions. And the healthy balance is something in the middle. And until you have someone that is removed from that a bit, it can be really hard to make those business decisions. And so I would kind of wear the, the hat of the kind of heartless robot that's like, here's what's right for the business. And then we would find an answer that was something in the middle. But I mean, you know, you have a capacity problem. You're not charging very much right now. There's a really obvious answer to that. We don't have to make this harder than it needs to be. But again, it is hard because that's such an emotionally taxing thing to do. Right. And so we convince ourselves like oh no, if we bump up our prices, we'll get pulled from that. Being able to be the teacher in that, in that thing. And like people will talk bad about us. One client leaves, they'll tell everybody else. And you kind of build this narrative in your head. I was like, well, either increase prices so you don't have to serve as many clients or stop taking in new work or let some clients go because let's not forget making a million bucks a year. Hot dang. Two more pains they called out here. Scope creep. We're a pillar of trust in our community and when payroll companies for 1k insurance, etc. Make mistakes, we're always the first source to try to fix and advise. Yeah, I mean it feels like you're pricing yourself like bookkeeping work, but you're doing a lot more. And then last pain scaling advisory. We actually have a vision for scaling our advisory services but it is constricted by time and money constraints which makes me pick up the slack while we develop that. Be a great thing to test. Like is, is this something people are willing to pay for? Oftentimes they aren't. But like if someone will pay 2 to 3x the normal monthly for some more hands on advisory, it's worth testing. If they will, then that's a vastly better client than the new client. That will only buy bookkeeping. Assuming you can staff advisory, which is a tough thing to do. Advisory can't be the unicorn scarce person just shooting from the hip. Advisory has to be like here's a kind of step one through 10 approach to a more turnkey version of advisory. Then you super de skill the the staffing that's required to make that stuff work well. But if that does work, what, what what are we doing taking in new clients then at 700amonth instead of clients who will pay for advisory at 1800 or 2400amonth. Remember if you, if you're upselling somebody on a more premium package like that, that can't be more work, that has to be better work. So that work has to be 2 or 3x as profitable per input whether that's hours or collection of whatever it is you use to measure that. You know, upselling someone to a fourteen hundred dollar a month advisory package, that's twice as much work as the base $700 a month package has now. More. That's just better. I said that backwards. That's not better, that's just more. But if people will pay for that and that's more profitable work, then you got to get more exclusive. Like you shouldn't take on the next $700 a month client or you should cut the clients who will only pay $700 a month because that's a much more, an even more profitable practice for the folks that will, that will jump on the advisory opportunity. And this is kind of one of the fun things about. Fun isn't the right word. One of the great opportunities about three tier proposals is when you put this stuff in front of clients, they self select and so you don't have to guess who's going to be in, who's not going to be in. And if somebody's never going to upsell or they already complain about what they're paying right now, like they're a great candidate to let go to make room for the next client that will take on the more premium package. And then if you're really up against capacity constraints, then you only onboard new clients who will like start with that more premium package from day one. I've said this a bunch of times already. This firm's crushing it, man. You almost don't even want to give them any advice. It's like human nature to put pressure on ourselves to keep doing that thing better. But the crazy thing about running a firm is you'll look back three years in the past and be like, if that person could see me now, their mind would be blown. Like for most of us they're like, you're making more money than you ever thought that you would. But oftentimes you have more problems than you ever had before and you're not any more satisfied than you were before. So while there's always opportunities to improve, we also have to perpetually battle this feeling of like, is this enough? Do I need to do more? Because the answer for most of us is no. Like, it's like, it's fun. Like I enjoy building businesses. And so you want to like take that stuff as far as you can and create opportunities for your team and all that stuff. But you got to balance that with, with also the bigger picture and recognizing you got something really freaking cool right now. Now if you're on a firm. Whether it's an awesome, cool, profitable firm or you are just absolutely about to bite the dust. Check out the form down in the show notes for a chance to be roasted in a future episode. If you're into the idea of niching down, check out the playlist that we've linked down in the show notes as well for some ideas there. And that's all we got for today. I got some upcoming live events. I would love to see you in person for one day AI events that are coming up July 14th in Los Angeles, California July 16th in Denver, Colorado July 22nd in Chicago, Illinois July 25th in Atlanta, Georgia. Tickets for all these@jasononfirms.com events and there's nothing better than getting to hang with people and talk about this stuff in person. It's like our single biggest KPI for the business now is like how many in person connections can we make? Because that's the transformative stuff is getting out of the battle station, out of the tunnel vision of your firm and going out and having conversations with other folks that do what you do in person. Like there's nothing, nothing better than that. These events have got a rock star lineup. I'll be keynoting it, but there's gonna be a bunch of cool people there. If you are anywhere near these locales, it's totally worth the trip. I've heard from a number of people that are flying out from different parts of the country just for these one day events. Gonna be really, really good. I wanna see you there. That's thanks for coming and hanging. I'll see you in the next one.