492 What’s My Price to Coach An Accounting Firm?

Today on the podcast, what is my price to coach an accounting firm? And more generally, how much do coaches charge to work with accounting firms? I'm going to share with you my thoughts on coaching in 2025. I will say coaching is kind of trending downwards in some ways, but we'll talk about why. Also, because this is a Q and A episode. We're going to talk about some early stories I'm hearing about ChatGPT agent usage that's really, really exciting. Something, some stuff that's not working, but also some other really cool stuff that is happening. Like this is the first truly autonomous AI agents we have that can support us in our accounting firms. And then last, should I build my service offerings around work life balance? Like if I'm struggling with making this whole thing sustainable, should I customize the stuff that my firm sells to accommodate that? Let's talk about that today on a Q and A installment of Jason on Firms. Foreign. If you're new here, welcome to the Jason on Firms podcast where we talk all things accounting firm running on the road today. I got a couple events in Texas this week, but my most asked question that I get, not an exaggeration, probably multiple times a week, can you come and coach my firm? What's your price, Jason? Could we pay you? Could we hire you to do this, that and the other thing. And the funny thing about that is there's like this paradox where nobody would be asking me to coach them if I coached people, because if I coached people, I wouldn't have the time to do stuff like this. It's my like laser focus on one to many content, videos, podcasts, all that stuff that makes it so that people even know that I exist. And that by extension gives me a lot of access to be able to do coaching. But then if I start coaching, I can't do all this stuff, right? I personally, I've never done any coaching because I'm so bought into the leverage that one to many content does. And genuinely there is, there is not a price. But looking elsewhere at coaches in our space, prices for coaches in some ways are like prices for accountants where you can hire a coach kind of at any price in the same way that you can hire an accountant at any price. And I wouldn't even say that quality necessarily like totally always matches up to price. So I don't, I don't want that to sound like I'm dunking on cheap coaches, but there's a lot of coaches out there. And the tricky thing, like what makes coaching challenging is there's so many different types of firms out there, so many different personalities. And my take is I really think that you can only be as helpful as you have like, very nuanced understanding of running an accounting firm. And that's, that's a specific type of coaching that is like specific to accounting firms. There's definitely general business advice and general business coaching that is still helpful to accounting firms. But the type of coaching that I think about and I met someone at an event recently that told me this. They have their partner who's working with like a very expensive consultant and has been for a good six months. This person posted on a LinkedIn post of mine where I was like, hey, I got a couple hours. Drop your tech stack down below here and I'll roast your tech stack. And I recorded like five or ten minute little looms videos breaking down their tech stack and what I would do different. They took that to their partner who's had this six month consultant and they were like, in 10 minutes, that was vastly more useful for me than anything. We've gotten this consultant that we've paid a bunch of money. And that's not, that's not like me tooting my horn. That's. I think the more targeted the consulting is and relevant to your accounting firm and your service mix and specifically what you need in your firm, the better that coaching is. And, and when people can go out and like, I give people a hard time about this. There's a lot of people that listen to this podcast that have problems that are clearing 300 grand a year, making more money than they ever could have imagined. And if we could just bring ourselves to like cut some clients and dial things back and maybe make, I don't know, just a paltry quarter million a year, we could have a pretty good lifestyle. I don't mean to like diminish how hard all of that is, but those people who can go out and build those profitable businesses, they're not looking around going, you know what? I want an hourly job coaching. Cause they're crushing accounting firm stuff, right? And it's the same reason that people look at me, the Internet grifter, the influencer, and they're like, well, if he really knew what he was doing, he'd be doing what I do in running an accounting firm, right? And just to hop in the Wayback Machine. Two years ago I was running a $5 million accounting firm. That's my background. But I hung up the sticks because I love doing what I do now. So if you're in the Market for an accounting firm coach, the more relevant the experience they have to you, the better. And honestly, like, and that goes to a really deep level of nuance from your service mix to who the stakeholders in your firm are, like, are you a brand new firm, like avocado toast, skinny jeans, like drinking all the cool new firm Kool aid stuff, you got all this flexibility to do whatever you want, or are you steering an old wooden sailing vessel from the 1800s? Do you have legacy partners and you have to navigate all that stuff? Those are completely different firms. What practice management system do you use? Like, even stuff like that very much impacts how you build your workflows. So the more into the weeds you can find that coach, the better. But here's why I don't think coaching is what it was 10 years ago. Two reasons actually. Number one is these days information is free. And there's so much high quality information out there now that's completely free to help people build accounting firms. My whole North Star with what I do is to put out the information that I needed when I was running my accounting firm because everywhere I looked, I couldn't find it. Now there's folks like, there's me, there's other folks like me that are putting really, really good stuff out there. And the coaching business, in the past you would paywall that information. Now the way to get build a coaching business is to give out information and then have people pay for implementation. But a decade ago, 20 years ago, that wasn't the case. You couldn't even get the information for free. That's the first reason why I think coaching's gotten a little tougher. Second, and I'm obviously biased here, but the second is that access to peers has never been easier. So if you listen to the podcast, you know, it's not a secret. I run an accounting firm alliance called realize. It's almost 600 firms now. And, and the whole premise of that community is to help you meet a bunch of other firm runners just like you. And I always have to be careful of this because I've seen the success stories. And so I try to see this through a lens of like, is this just rose colored glasses? But for me right now, building a peer group, however you do it, that could be on social media, that could be going to your local chapter and making friends, that could be joining my community, could be joining other communities like the one that I run, Having a peer group to me is more important than having a coach. I would not go to a coach until I had a peer group. I would have a peer group and then decide, do I still need a coach? Because what the peer group offers is like a level of emotional support and tactical support that is much, much more diverse than what you can get from a single coach. That's not a limitation of the coach. I would say the exact same thing about me. In fact, I tell people who want me to come work with them, I'm like, you know what would be more useful for you is the perspective of a hundred other firm runners who are actually doing this stuff right now, by the way. I'm not. These people are. Let me get you access to them. And that, in my opinion, it's better information. It's a greater diversity of perspective. Let you know in a secret. It's actually a whole lot cheaper than coaching, too. That, I think, is the first thing to develop in sort of your ongoing sort of personal growth stack. I would do that before I would do coaching. The talks I'm doing here in Texas are around, like, some pretty cool workflow stuff. And it is. There are workflow opportunities that I have seen work in tens, if not hundreds of accounting firms. So I'm pretty convicted. Like, this stuff works. But inevitably, you put these ideas in front of accounting firm owners. They see it through their lens, and a lot of the time they're like, well, that would never work. And it's like, well, then why is it working for a lot of people? And that's a. That's a. Because that is something that your peers are doing. You have to scrutinize that through a different lens than when you see, say, thought leadership from a software company that says, here is how you go and you sell advisory and why it's imperative to do so. I see that, and I'm like, okay, that's not independent. That's biased. But I see other firms having success with something, and I have to stop and kind of pause and think about that. And it's not to say that everything everybody's doing is right or as good as the way that I'm doing things, but the only path to doing something better is breaking my worldview, somehow breaking the assumptions that I hold today. I can't get to a better place without something I currently hold to be true or correct, but being broken and abandoning that. And when it's other firms doing something or other firms finding success or doing things a different way, I have to give that a different level of attention than what I see from a software vendor. And oftentimes what I would even. What I would even Hear from a coach. So I don't want this to come off as like, there's not a place for coaches in 2025, because I know a bunch of great coaches. You can find them at any price. Coaches generally go through the same evolution that many of us do where they start with hourly coaching, it gets more and more expensive and then they're like, I don't wanna do the one on one stuff anymore. So then they just start doing group coaching and like masterminds. Some of them end up running communities. And those communities are like, for access to that person. That's not my community. It's not access to me. It's access to a community of really smart people for whom this content resonates. And when you meet a bunch of people that are like, yeah, dude, I listen to the podcast every single day too, that is wild. Like when you make that connection and you're like, okay, we have a lot in common here. That's the best thing I can offer you is that connection, not access to me. But a lot of coaches go through this same evolution. And it's the same evolution I went through in my accounting firm where I was just a staff person. Eventually I bought out some of the partners of the firm and phased my way out of doing any client work. So it was a 40 person firm. And the last couple of years I was fully out of client work. But as you can imagine, there were a lot of clients that were like, I still want you to work with us. Like, we like working with you. We what's your price? And for a while we kind of fudged that where it's like, oh yeah, okay, if you go on this super expensive package, we'll do it. And by the end, like they were paying a lot of money for me to be very fractionally in the loop. But at the end of the day, we just had to get to the decision of like, that's just not the most useful way for me to apply my skills. And there really isn't a price that can justify that. Wildest thing of being out of client work is you see that everything else can be leveraged kind of without limits. That is building a team and like pouring your skills into people that is doing one to many things that have no limits. Like I can record this podcast and there's no incremental effort for me for one more person to consume it, right? And once you start drinking that Kool Aid, you kind of get red pilled to that. Then you're kind of. I mean, you're unemployable, but you're also have reached like escape velocity for from ever doing something for any sort of hourly rate. This episode is brought to you in part by ClientHub. ClientHub been one of my recommended practice management systems for a while, but they're doing some really cool stuff. One of the first PMs investing heavily in workflow and if you followed my Maslow's Hierarchy Pyramid Food chart of the tech needs of your accounting firm Right now the workflow tools are getting super super good, but it almost feels wasteful to buy it. In addition to a practice but management system, that's something Client Hub is working on. So they do all the practice management stuff that you want from the dashboards to track your work tasks that can be assigned to clients. A really good client portal, time tracking, CRM, email integration, all that stuff. But they've also got a really good QuickBooks and zero integration for stuff like resolving uncategorized expenses, even uncategorized deposits, requesting receipts from clients. All like in the same client portal they already use. They're also doing some cool AI stuff, quote unquote magic books review. Identify expense inconsistencies and other review items across the balance sheet and P and L Client Hub definitely worth checking out if you are a bookkeeping or cast practice. And I love that they're going hard on workflow now. Learn more about them. Check out the link down in the show notes this episode is brought to you in part by Canopy, the practice management system, who I'm co hosting some events for over the next few weeks. Totally free events like unrelated to Canopy, just about workflow in general. We're going to be in Dallas, we're going to be in Austin, we're going to be in Minneapolis and we're going to be in Boston. Okay, if you're anywhere near there, I want to see you. I'm going to do a keynote. We're going to end with a Q and A. It's like a half day sort of thing. I think you get a few hours of cpe, they're going to feed you lunch. What more do you need? Going to be some smart conversations, but also just a great hang. Spots are pretty limited for these events. I think we're targeting about 70 attendees for each. Those are going to go pretty fast. To learn more about those events, check out the links down in the show notes. Two other two other things I want to talk about. One some stories I'm seeing in the wild about ChatGPT agent in fact Robert Saab shared on LinkedIn. Robert's a podcast listener. Thanks for sharing this, Robert. He shared that he has a large client spreadsheet that he reviews and corrects each quarter because, quote, the client does not have the time to use QuickBooks fully. It's a pain for him and time consuming. Currently he pulls all the reports and gives them to a junior staff member to update, but it takes them a full day. He thought, why not try throwing this thing at ChatGPT agent? It's a great use case for Agent. The problematic agent stuff is when it's like logging into your systems online. This is just giving it some big meaty jobs to do. This is the use case I love for Agent right now. There's no risk of it like going on a flyer and going and breaking some system. Like if I give it access to my QBO and then I cover my eyes and it works for 20 minutes. There's a world where it could misclick some things and cause some problems, right? Not in this case. You got a spreadsheet and a bunch of PDFs he's working with. He said 15 minutes later it was a success, or at least a modest success. It missed a few things. For example, it struggled with Roman numeral numeral 2 versus the number 2. He prompted it for 30 more minutes and in the end the result was as accurate as what he would get back from a junior staff member and also made the same kind of mistakes that a junior staff member would make. He said his time saved ultimately in this first round was zero. Kind of blew up his Saturday playing with it. But knowing what he knows now, he thinks he can have AI do this job within an hour. And that is ChatGPT agent in its current form. As we always say, this is the worst that it will ever be. That's pretty cool. Like the notion of ChatGPT agent being the new floor for this like universal software solution where you could just tell it in plain English and chuck a bunch of files at it and say go do xyz. That's really cool. That's unbelievably helpful. We've got a video coming to the to the main channel that's more of a deep dive on different use cases. But some other things I've seen in the wild on this series of AI events I've been doing. Chad Davis had a test where he would have it go through like all 100 attendees and go out and find some interesting facts about them and it just wouldn't do all hundred every time. It would get to like mid-30s and it would stop. And I think this is because ChatGPT agent on the back end doesn't have an unlimited amount of time to run. And this is just OpenAI, you know, saying you can't give it an impossibly big task because that would consume a humongous amount of server compute and be really expensive. So I'm thinking of ChatGPT agent right now as the, a really useful tool for the annoyances, for the fiddly things that we wish we didn't have to do. I don't know how big and median ambitious of projects it will do. Although this story actually from Robert like that is a pretty meaty task. What I was honestly thinking is like, okay, we've got this system that doesn't sync files back to this system every single day at noon, go out and do xyz like that's down the road. What seems super useful to me being able to build sort of custom software integrations just by explaining to it what to do and having it do it every day or on the 5th of every month. And then you got like all these recurring agents running. That's really powerful. But some other testing I've done, I've done a little more robust testing of having it take tax source documents and put it into an Excel workbook template. What I did the other day was I gave it seven pretty detailed government forms like tax docs. The hairiest one is probably a brokerage statement and it has, I used the Excel 1040 Excel workbook which has like 60 tabs, but it's this huge workbook with a whole bunch of inputs for government forms and your W2S 1099Rs, all that stuff. It flawlessly put in all seven tax docs. Like it made sense of Social Security statements, 1099 dividends, couple W2s, brokerage statement. It entered, entered all of that stuff flawlessly in about 15 minutes. And who that's on a $30 a month ChatGPT team plan. I mean imagine where that is in two years. Like can I give that a hundred pages of source docs and it will immaculately organize that into an Excel file and then go navigate my tax software and enter it as well. That honestly feels like doable within a couple year time horizon. I mean that like with how close we are to that now, in fact, arguably it might be capable of that right now. The problem is we just don't have an AI agent that's allowed to work long enough on that problem to get it done. I Mean, I've said this a couple times now, like in 24 months, at least 10, 40, tax prep is going to look wildly different. And it's not to say it's going to be able to do everything. And there, there aren't a lot of things we're going to have to fill in the gaps on. And it boils down to like, are we even asking the right questions and giving it complete information? Because there's a whole lot that goes into tax prep that doesn't come off of government forms. Right. But this, I mean, almost certainly changes how we approach our work. A couple tests I've run, there's some things. The whole premise of ChatGPT agent is it can control an Internet browser and, and that gives it some new capabilities because sometimes it needs to visually see what's on a web page as opposed to just using ChatGPT and giving it permission to browse the web. What that does behind the scenes, like if I say like find me some concerts to go to next month, it'll go look at 80 websites, but it just pulls the code of those websites. It doesn't visually look at them because that's much, much faster. Agent, on the other hand, it visually opens all these websites in a browser which is much slower but gives it a different level of comprehension. And so there's some use cases where it's like, well, am I better off just using deep research rather than using ChatGPT agent? And I actually think right now for a lot of things, Agent is better because it seems to be allowed to work longer on a problem. Like Agent will sometimes work up to 30 minutes on something. But also, and this is a biggie with Agent, you can set it to recur so it can finish a task and then you can say, run this every month, every week, every day. And don't forget, it can also use connectors. So connectors are like built in integrations in ChatGPT. Connect it to Google Drive, SharePoint, your Gmail, your Outlook mail, and these are read only connections. So there's no risk of it sending a rogue email or something like that. But right now you can connect it to your, say, your Outlook mail and say, summarize my unread email messages, the spicy ones that look like they're from actual humans, and then set that to recur every morning at 6am Boom. You get a notification on your phone, 6:30 every morning, a summary of the spiciest stuff. That's, I mean, that's pretty cool, right? Don't forget about connections. Connections don't require it to go out and like use a browser or use the interface or anything like that. So they run much more efficiently. Today's episode is sponsored in part by Cloud Accountant Staffing who helps you find talented offshore accountants, but now also nearshore accountants. So cloud account staffing, it's actually run by former accounting firm owners. They started hiring in the Philippines, had great luck, ended up hiring some local recruiters and the rest is history. But now they're expanding to Latin America and South Africa. The main benefit of this if you've worked with folks in the Philippines is having folks in different time zones makes it easier to align with your work schedule. Particularly if these are folks that are going to be either part of a pod that like needs to really be able to work like live shoulder to shoulder and also if you're going to have these folks like serving clients directly in client facing roles. Now Cloud Accountant Staffing has helped hundreds of accounting firms build teams in the Philippines, but now I've got more flexibility than ever. To learn more. Check out the link down in the show notes. Hey, real quick. I want to invite you to my super excellent weekly newsletter. My newsletter was like the start of my thought leadership journey. It's where I try to collect what I think are the most important things for to see every single week sent to you every Wednesday morning. Make sure you don't miss any of the good stuff. Right. Increasingly we're also building into that some like of the best evergreen thought leadership I've ever done. Kind of make that like the most action packed, highest quality email you get to your inbox each week. Because listen, we're all busy, all right? You're not gonna see every single little thing that I put out. Goodness sakes, there's just too much. If you're not on my newsletter yet, check that out jasononfirms.com or I'll put a link to it down in the show notes. Okay, last number three. Should you customize the services you offer in the name of sustainability like work, life, balance? And this question came up specifically through the lens of. I'll just read the question. I want to thank you for the great content. Listen to every episode of Jason Daily. Jason on farms. Bless your heart. We need some sort of like commemorative patch. We're closing in on 500 episodes. We need some sort of like commemorative patch for the people that have listened to all 500. I will also tell you there are people who have now done several laps. The largest number I've heard is three laps of all Episodes, we call this the Grand Prix. That person would be what's called a three timer. And for the people who have put in the work, you know what I think you're due. You're just deserts. Some sort of, some sort of reward for this, right? Anyways, the question I wanted to ask your opinion on if it's worth it to run a solo tax resolution firm and have less emphasis on tax prep, to have better work, life balance, less my answer, I do know some people that just run tax resolution practices and that's pretty cool, especially through the lens of like, there's a lot of people in need who don't have a lot of money to pay for this stuff that need help. And this is where I get back to, like, not a big believer in running an accounting firm to quote unquote, help the community. Because what that usually means is you will do a tax return for someone for $600 instead of $800, but that person drives a Lexus. I'm more in favor of helping the people that have nothing to pay than doing like low bono work and having an entire client list of low bono clients. But to help the people that have nothing to pay requires more of a barbell approach where you're also charging the people who have money to pay top dollar. Very hard to build that business unless you've got the other end of the spectrum folks paying top dollar, but like, incredibly needed for the folks that don't have money to pay for the help. But to be honest, I object to the premise of the question altogether if your reason for going to tax resolution work is that you can't make traditional tax work workable. Like, if you can't like make taxis and not be too hairy, then the problem is just how we're running the tax business. Because there, there is no rule about running accounting firms that cannot be broken. I mean, the, the CPA firm that I work with, they don't work an hour of overtime all year. I'm pretty sure they work like half days on Fridays. And they're a great, great firm for whatever reason. Like, our model for how to do all this stuff is, is super shaped by how we've seen other people do it. You know, like, that's probably the firms that we came up in. It's probably the people that we know who run accounting firms. Like, our only model for what is possible is what we've seen other people do in the wild, but that can be reverse engineered. If you want to run a tax firm and not work any overtime hours you gotta find the people that do that and spend time with them. If, you know, if you got a group of local people, and this probably doesn't apply to firm running because you're not gonna find this group of people. But if you've got this group of people and you, you go to breakfast with them every single Wednesday, and there's maybe they're just entrepreneurs, successful entrepreneurs, and there's something fundamentally different about their worldview. It is just a matter of time before your worldview adapts to theirs. Like, we are products of the people around you, us, the things that we. Similarly, in accounting firm parlance, if you've got, you know, other people out there that are charging $10,000 plus for tax planning and loads of firms are doing this, cast practices, bookkeeping practices that are charging $5,000 for a discovery project before you'd ever even work with that client. If those things just feel unthinkable to you, where you hear that and you're like, I don't even believe them. I can tell you, like, that is the norm for a huge number of firms. I mean, you go to look at regional firms or big four firms, like, they would laugh at the things that I just said. They would never touch work for that price. And so the problem isn't, you know, it's unrealistic or we're taking advantage of clients or something like that. The problem is that just hasn't been normalized for you yet. And we can reverse engineer that normalization simply by spending time around those people. Like, get them to hop on a call, see if you can get in a mastermind or something like that. And it's just a matter of time before that becomes the norm for you. So if there's some aspect of your business that today feels unsustainable and you're like, this isn't it. It's not doing it for me. Then it just means you haven't found it yet. Because if the only version of accounting firms that we can run as a mirror image of what we left of traditional accounting, then what's the point of doing all this, right? We're perpetuating this lame model for how to run an accounting firm when the beauty of this is the agency that we have to make it whatever we want it to be. And, man, we're going to have days where it absolutely kicks us in the butt. And oftentimes that will feel like it is the majority of the days. But there is so much diversity in how people run accounting firms and, and how much they work and how they compensate their teams and how they find clients and how they decide what type of people they want to work with. Like this is such a unique thing, accounting, because everybody in the world needs accountants. Like name any type of people, any type of business, they need accountants. We can go work with the people that we enjoy. And an accounting firm running the public perception, it's not sexy. It's just about the least sexy thing like on the spectrum of sexiness. You look at people going to work in Hollywood and it's like impossible to get work in Hollywood because everybody wants to do it. The opposite end of the spectrum to that. It might be, yes. And it's not to say that running an accounting firm isn't hard. It is, but it could be worse. It's not a bad gig. And like we can't let our sort of our self limiting beliefs get in the way of something that we may feel like we're stuck on right now. When the solution is you get stuck on that thing. Like I can't imagine hiring somebody to help with my email. Find 10 people who've had an assistant managing their email for the last decade. Spend some time with them. That's going to become the norm for you real quick. That's the fun I'm getting to do. This stuff is like, you know, our, our sort of view of what's possible and sort of the world that we live in. Like we can't get to something better until something about our worldview breaks. You can't get from where you are today as a product of all those assumptions and sort of baked in beliefs. And so you can't get to the next thing until those break somehow. But that's the challenge, like that's the fun is growing, learning new skills, becoming a better boss, being able to help even more people. That's super rewarding. If you got any questions, we do these Q and A Fridays usually every other week or so. As I mentioned, I'm in Texas this week. I've got live events coming up next week in Minneapolis and Boston. I would love to see you there. I am, I'm blown away at how y' all are turning out for these live events. It's been amazing. These AI live events. We did about half the attendees. We had about a hundred people at each event. About half the attendees are flying in for them. They're one day events. I hear that though and I'm like, holy smokes. Did the bar just go up for what these people want from the event? But in my humble opinion, they've gone super well. We survey at the end of all these, how likely are you recommend to recommend a friend to this event? One to five. And the fives are coming in at like over 70% which is actually really really hard to do with an accountant audience, especially accountants who are travel. And especially with AI where any AI talk. It's so hard to meet everybody where they're at because there's such a huge spectrum of comfort level with AI. But the events we got coming up next week, they're totally free half day events. You get four hours of cpe. I'm doing a keynote and a Q and a. You're gonna meet a bunch of cool people that are coming to hang out. I always, when I do talks, I always have people raise their hand if they listen to the podcast so that you can see like oh cool. Like all those people listen these AI talks, probably 2/3 to 3/4 of the room raise their hand. That's the fun of these events. Like it is such a like minded group of people that you're gonna walk away with some friends. So super recommend you check them out. Events up to date. Event information is always gonna live@jasononfirms.com events would love to see you. And hey, thanks for being here. You look as smart smart as ever. Hey, I'll see you in the next one.