513 8 Sneaky Limiting Beliefs Holding Back Accounting Firms

So many times you hear that big brain idea and your reaction is, well, that'll never work for my clients. How many, how many times have we heard that? That'll never work for my clients is a great statement to unpack. And I mean, I've said this a hundred times. This is, this is some medicine that I needed because at the beginning of every great positive change is somebody saying that or just that reality that, that maybe that doesn't work for some of your clients, but at its core that is a low agency statement. Doesn't work for my clients. Well, does it work for you? Do you want the clients for whom that works? Because the fact that it may not work for some of your clients, that's not a reason not to do it. And so I want to unpack this a little bit further with sort of 8 thoughts around navigating that statement and that very real belief where it's like, dude, all I got right now is the clients that I have. So how do I see over that, like blind crest? Maybe there's something on the other side of that, but how do I trust that and how do I get from A to B? Because these are the clients that I have today and I want to drink the thought leadership Kool Aid, but tell me how to get there. So I'm going to help you break down today eight thoughts around this. On the other side of this, I think it is a higher agency way to operate to be able to say, here's actually the clients that we want. We have the confidence and the tools and the abilities to build a firm around that, like, best fit client for us, rather than just looking at who you got and being like, well, this is who we brought to the dance, is all we can do. All right, let's get into it. Worth identifying self limiting beliefs as you stumble into them because like what we're capable of today, what our firm can do, it is all a product of the assumptions that we hold. And so getting to that next thing, whatever the best thing is, and it, like it requires breaking some aspect of that right. Of your worldview of, of what you think a client will say yes to, of what clients even exist out in the world. Because we're just, we're kind of wired to experience the world through just what we have done, which is very limited. Right. And that's the, the beauty of podcasts like this, where you can, we can share our experiences and what other people are doing, tap into a little bit of other people's lived experiences and you're like, oh dang. That is like, it's a much bigger world than I realized and, and I actually have control to like manifest some of this stuff and steer us in a more intentional direction rather than running a business that kind of just operates based on whatever stumbles in the door. Right. Is maybe one of the biggest mistakes that I made was like you just kind of trust that you're going to get a certain number of referrals every year and you just sit back and you let that stuff happen and that's genuinely how your business can operate for decades, hoping people keep referring and that when people occasionally leave those referrals take their spots and everything is kind of okay. But that's, that's it. We just sit back and we hope that everything else just happens. And the reason why, why so many accounting firms still run this way is that usually that works just fine. Like you, you can, you can sit back, you can run a profitable firm that way, but doesn't mean you should. Is that the optimized way to run a firm? Because a lot of those same people, we all know, like what lifestyle has looked like in most accounting firms. Not great. But even if, like, I don't know, I am a, I'm an optimizer man, like even if I got a good thing, like what's going to take it to being a better thing within reason. And so surely like sitting back and just seeing what walks in the door isn't an optimized way to run this. Run an accounting firm. That is. Okay. 8 thoughts Specifically around kind of that statement, well, that doesn't work. I'll never work for my clients. Number one is that oftentimes if you really unpack that statement more, it's your C and your D clients that that doesn't work for. So when I say C and D clients, talking about just client grading on a spectrum. A clients being your best clients, D clients being your worst clients. Why does it stop at D? Why not F? I don't know. But when we think about the people that at Warrant won't work for, oftentimes those folks that come to mind, they're almost never your A clients. And so I, I mean the firm that I bought was an 80 year old tax firm. And I mean I could show you like a decade that we were stuck on. Well yeah, we all want to do this and we even have clients that are clamoring for this change. The problem is, well these, these folks, they're not digital native folks. This is going to be hard for them. So rather Than the solution being we're going to do it and then, and then find ways to accommodate them. The solution was just let's just do nothing. And so like the lesson here to me is there's so much power in being able to acknowledge that bit of feedback that you just got from a client or a complaint that you got from a client or, or them coming to mind when you're considering doing a new thing. That person, you got to be able to get to a letter grade in your head pretty quick to give yourself permission to either wait, weight that feedback more or less. And this is probably the case for you, the number of folks who take up headspace for you. For most of us, the Cs and the Ds are taking up way more headspace than the A's and the B's. And this is problematic, right, because we're building an accounting firm for the A's and the B's, really the A's. And the path that, you know, is overly accommodating of the Cs and the Ds runs the risk of alienating the A's because you're not building the firm that the A's need. So when you have that pang of this is never going to work for the clients I have today, dig into that a little more. When those, those few clients come to mind, what are they? Are they A or B clients? If they are, that matters. I mean, some things just don't work, especially for specialized firms. So if I'm going to, if I'm going to do a whole bunch of individual tax prep for, for, you know, folks in nursing homes where that's a very different set of needs, where I got to come in and do some stuff in person, oftentimes coordinating with the family, an extremely valuable service that you could build a cool business around, right? That is not the firm where you're going to go like super all out techie on client portals and stuff like that. So the right answer for you will vary and it should vary. If we're all running generalist practices. That's not an accounting industry that serves, I think, entrepreneurs as, as best as they can be served. So different firms answer is going to look different here. But get explicit about who it won't work for. Is that your A client or is that your D client? Second thought here is we don't actually know what our clients will be into. We can guess, but we don't know for sure until we give them the opportunity to select into that different approach. And this applies to just about any type of change where a lot of the like mental friction that comes from considering doing something new. Like you got a tax firm, you're thinking about, you know, moving to fully scheduled 10, 1040 work rather than just doing it the order it comes on the door. Every client get gets a week and that's the week we work on their stuff. And that's just how it is. Oftentimes a lot of the mental friction with, with considering that change is our own projection of what we think clients reactions to that will be. But there's a whole ton of examples where folks are like universally surprised at client behaviors when they make a big change. So and the biggest one is when firms go through dramatic price increases across the board. You always hear like how shocked they are how many folks stay on or how many few clients leave think they're going to, you know, see 40% of the client base walk because they just double the price and you know, one client or two clients will leave. This is incredibly common from folks. Also firms leaning into three tier proposals for the first time. I very consistently heard that they were surprised at how many people opted into a silver or gold plan that was 2 to 3x the price of what they did like last year. And so if, if, if we're persistently surprised by these changes and what clients reactions to them are, then I don't know that we can always, we can always trust our gut here. Again this, this probably comes back to the few people who have had an extreme response in the past, like somebody that objects to using a portal or something like that. And we project that over a whole bunch of other clients. The reality is we don't hear from the clients who are perfectly happy from that change. So then the next time we go to make a change we're like, oh, they're going to hate this one too. Remember when we rolled out E signatures and they, and you know, these six people didn't like it. We didn't hear from the other 600 people. So I think we oftentimes blow this out of proportion a little bit almost. And speaking from again something I did almost as a justification for inaction, I can tell you this is definitely the case for me is is it's really easy to talk yourself out of it. Right. All right, third thought here is just a reminder that you don't have to serve every single client the same way. You just need a language for what the differences are and how you serve different clients. So like I'm not real bought into like this wouldn't be. The way that I could run my accounting firm is like, just have a single flavor of dog food, sell that to everyone. You definitely do that. Totally fine for me, I am obviously too much into the optimization of like, well, what does person A want? What does person B want? What does person A willing to pay and what is person B willing to pay? Because those are going to be different things. And so within that it requires like having a system to understand. Well, for this client we always do that. For this other client, we always do that. And every firm has some version of this, even the turnkey firms that say they do the same thing for everybody. You've got all sorts of client preferences that you're tracking. And how did this get delivered last year? Do we email it to them? Do we call them? Do they hop into the portal and do X, Y, Z? And these are super important details to track so that anyone can step into a project and deliver it to the client's expectations. And so, and those are just, those are very basic examples of it as well. The client wants us to schedule a zoom meeting with them when the monthly financials are done. But this other client, they want to do a phone call or they want you to send them a video delivery or something like that. I'm totally fine catering to clients wants their as long as it isn't in conflict with my advice. Like if I think they need something fundamentally different, then we, we got to, we got to kind of work through that. But those differences, we need to have systems to track those differences. And so that my approach here is like the service library and we've been doing an episode every single week the kind of the last month of this summer, digging into that service library further. But if you have a way to serve different clients differently, then it's a little easier to tailor the experience for what that a client is, is super into what's most useful for them. Now you don't want to take this too far because the bad version of this is catering to bad fit clients and what their needs are. And then you got a firm is doing 100 different things. This is always, there's always the battle is battling the upside of flexibility and how you can do like really profitable work by keeping in tune with what you're a client wants and kind of building out your service delivery for. For their needs. But oftentimes that takes the way you get the work done away from what the process used to be and what. And what your other clients are used to. And so this is a balancing act of how, how, like out on a limb will I go to do something for the clients that feel like our future clients that we would love to, you know, hundred X, we got three of these people right now. We'd love to have 300 of them. How much are we willing to kind of go out on a limb for the way they want us to do the work while still maintaining these legacy processes for other clients? It is a balancing act, I can tell you. I think the biggest mistake we make here is probably hiring to bring along those legacy clients. This is the classic walking by $100 bill on the sidewalk. Why would you not keep that client if somebody else could serve it and they make us 100 bucks a month? Because you got $500 opportunities over here. But all that being said, the ability to serve a better type of client differently, that doesn't necessarily mean that we are like burning the ships and cutting all the legacy clients because we can serve clients differently. And a very easy, very practical example of this is the place to start with a change you want to make in your firm is ensuring that you never let a new client in again under the old regime, under the old way of doing things. If you're a tax firm, maybe this is like everybody goes on automatic extension. Great. Never let a single new client in the door without that expectation. And you'll find, by and large, most of them, when they come in, they're like, okay, cool. Like, that's just how it's done around here. That's a much, much easier expectation to set than to change the expectation for current clients thing for, you know, bookkeeping practices. If you got a bottleneck around the 10th of the month, don't, don't promise another set of books by the 10th of the month. Set a different expectation for new folks as they come in. The counter argument to this, and a lot of people fight me on this, is what ends your systems become a mess and you can't handle all these different ways of doing things for everybody. But the risk of that approach is then that every single change is incredibly high stakes. If every single client on the client list has to go by the exact same process. And, and to be clear, the yes, of course, like it goes without saying, we want everybody to track as similarly as we possibly can. But if everyone has to be like, identical to a T, then, man, like any sort of change to that process that gets rolled out across every single client, that's very, very high stakes. As opposed to, I have a 1040 service with various kind of variables. Like variables around how's information received, how. How is the tax return delivered in the end? And we have, you know, three or four different ways that we're willing to do that. There's ways to build systems for that, that customization that totally work and, like, are not a monster to manage. Most of us, we just don't have a system for managing those variables, and we haven't gotten explicit about what the acceptable options are. So we default to something that's even messier. Sally, you just go back and you look at whatever was done last year, and we're like, okay, this is what we'll do this year. Before you know it, you've been doing something for six years for no reason in particular because somebody thought the client wanted that that way. And you're like, no, it's just because every year we look at what we did last year and we just do the same thing. That's not a great. That's not a great system either, I would say. So don't be afraid to serve clients differently. Within reason, with good systems, this is something we can totally do where it's advantageous to you, whether. Where it's. Especially where it's catering to the clients that you're trying to build the future of your firm around. That number four here is. Is a lot of this hesitation is just fear, and that's totally fine, and that's totally natural. But the thing with fear, the thing to always do with fear is to get more specific, because all things are scary and intimidating when they're ambiguous. But the more we dig into them and we're like, what are we actually afraid about? Can we go several levels deeper? It gets a lot less scary then. So what's a. What's a scary change that maybe we. We would be afraid to roll out to clients? Maybe switching from hourly to upfront billing upfront, like, value pricing for the first time? Maybe we're afraid of the client's reaction to that. Maybe we're afraid we're going to lose our shorts because this is the first time where we're not billing once we've done all the work. And we're like, how do I even know how much that work ought to be if I haven't done it yet? Well, if you dig into that deeper, you can unpack each one of those risks. So for one, how do I make sure I don't lose my shorts? Well, the price you give upfront, it comes with a disclaimer that says, this is assuming the scope is the same as it was last year. And if it's not, the price will be different. It's kind of as simple as that. Right? But also what if you lose your shorts on a micro scale but you save a ton of time and you make the same money on a macro scale, thinking more of, of of groups of clients as almost like a portfolio of these projects. Can we ensure that we make the in the end across all of them? Great? Isn't that actually what matters? Especially if there's tremendous upside to not splitting hairs over every single one. Overcoming these fears is about digging into those very specific things. Richard Branson always says cuz he's he's seen as like a big risk taker. He says what he thinks he's actually good at is just planning for the downside. So you can do cool, big, ambitious, risky things. But how much time are you putting into what could potentially go go sideways? How you mitigate that stuff, how you make a plan for it if it does happen? The risky move is not doing that planning right. So dig into those spheres but also have a plan for the downside so that you can actually work out like it seems like in pretty much every scenario here we're actually going to be totally fine. Today's episode it is brought to you in part by Maker Sub Makers Hub is an accounts payable platform, the one that is going like super hard on AI. Really good for large business volume, complex accounts payable scenarios and gang this is like a real arbitrage opportunity right now. The clients we have with the messiest accounts payable departments, they're the ones with the most to gain by AI enabled AP stuff. Unfortunately the like the big boys, the traditional bill pay platforms, they're still relying on like OCR technology rather than AI vision models which just take like the automated extraction so much farther. In a vastly more detailed way too. When you can literally pull anything off a document, even handwritten stuff, the degree to which you can then automate not only entry but also the subsequent approval workflows. Really really cool. Maker Sub does some other stuff I like. Like they have a very very good two way sync with qbo so that Maker Sub doesn't become this entirely separate source of truth if you use a different erp. They've got a really good API for building your own custom stuff, even for like customizing how you export data en masse for import into another system. I've said it before, accounts payable. It is the fastest changing part of the accounting profession right now. If you want to help your clients leading the Charge into kind of the modernization of their back office. Makers up a great tool to do it with. To learn more, check out the link down in the show notes. Today's episode is brought to you in part by Carbon, the practice management system. Couple big announcements from Carbon over the summer if you've missed them. One, a totally brand new client facing portal like a beefed up client experience called Carbon for Clients. You can push tasks to IT documents, E signatures, all that stuff. For clients with multiple like entities and they're 1040, it's easy for them to quick switch between those accounts because I mean any business owner client we have, that's a problem, right? They've got their business, they've got the 1040, they've got eight other LLC. Carbon for clients makes that easy to access. But then another big announcement was a first of its kind. Super deep integration with Stanford Tax. Another tool we really like on this podcast because you got these really cool tax workflow tools but then none of them talk to your practice management system, right? Carbon wants to change that. Carbon's like an ecosystem first player. If you want the PM that's going to integrate with best of breed, take a look at carbon. PMs right now are kind of like separating into we're going to build our own versus we're going to integrate. Carbon's going hard down the integration path. The whole Stanford taxing is a good example of that. Got some videos on the YouTube channel about carbon if you haven't seen it in the wild before. I know folks down to like solo firms clear up to like some of these PE roll up platforms are using Carbon one of the most mature options in the game in a, in a good way I would say. More information about Carbon down the show Notes number five and this is a big one to remember. We can't forget about the clients who are clamoring for us to do that thing oftentimes to level up because leveling up requires changing and you are always going to have clients on your client list who want you to be the person that you used to be. And you are the only one that can put your foot down and be like no man, here's the person actually that I am. But, but even that's not the solution. The solution is here is the person that I'm, I'm trying to become. That's the person that I need to be living in service of. If I look, if I get real, real about who I am today, is that who I want to be? No, of course not. Like I'VE got ideas for, for all of these things that I can do better. And, and we all have that. But the client who's trying to keep you from going to that next thing or making that next change, oftentimes they're clinging to a person that is in your past. That is who you used to be. This is the whole problem with always dragging forward those clients that you started with who were great for you in the very, very beginning, but you're a different person now. You're a different firm. Now sometimes those clients will grow with you, but oftentimes, I don't know, loyalty or appreciation or something like that, it's misplaced because you're not actually excited about those projects anymore. Those people aren't getting your best anymore. And then there's another firm out there who is today in that stage that you were in before, where for them, that, that is an A client for them. For where, for now, that's like a C or a D client for you. So how do we align, like the person that we're trying to become and the firm we're trying to create with the clients who most need that? How do we maintain that as our North Star rather than catering to the lowest common denominator? Honestly, that's, that's probably the low agency, like, sort of inaction path is just catering to that lowest common denominator rather than me being super in touch with your A clients, the clients trying to find more of and being so, like, aligned with them and having conversations around, like, what you can do better that you actually listen to. Right. Whereas oftentimes for the C and D clients kind of got to tune that out because they're not trying to pull you in a direction, you're actually trying to go. And like the, the superpower here becomes when you do this and you commit to a path and then the next one shows up because what you've created is, is attractive for that type of person. And that, like, that is such a life. Like my last five years, that's probably the biggest change to me and how I make decisions every single day of the last five years is realizing I have the power to make stuff that will attract a certain type of person. And that's not like razzle dazzle videos or big brain thought leadership stuff. That is simply the way the world works. The fact that the more visible we are, the more, the more we are a lighthouse to folks who suffer from the pains that we solve, who are interested in the things that we talk about. And that absent some sort of effort of being visible and having conversations and meeting people and just being helpful, folks won't know you exist. And this has always been the case from, you know, pre Internet little micro communities. I mean you could see a world where like, you know, if you're a hermit, pre Internet, if you're a hermit and you never go out, none of the folks in your local community are going to know about you. Just think what has changed now in the social media platforms we have and how good they've gotten at surfacing really niche small content. Has our behavior changed enough to accommodate the fact that we now have like greater access to people around the world than we've ever had before with an entirely different level of specificity and nuance I'd argue for most of us are our behaviors actually haven't changed at all. And so if you're trying to talk yourself into doing that thing that you think is going to be great for the clients, where maybe you've only got a couple of them now, but you know, there's thousands more, I think, think like our monkey brains usually steer us in the, in the wrong direction there because we just can't get our head around how much opportunity is out there if we're willing to commit to building something that is for those people. And that's not a one time thing where you're like, okay, we're now going to do this and we're going to burn the ships and cut these legacy clients. Because that's, that's usually not the way to do it. Like getting more specific in your firm just, just in reality is about doing it a client at a time and you're only really doubling down on that type of client. If they're much more profitable, you enjoy working with them. All of that, not a big dramatic thing. And so putting on those binoculars and looking into the future like this is something that we're always doing. Like we're always trying to live in service of what that even more specific sort of thing, Even, even greater opportunity, even more fun opportunity is like that's not a big dramatic thing. Let's have a meeting and decide whether or not to do that. Like that is a lifestyle that is a way of going through life. And if your team can't buy into that, the problem isn't then can I get my, my team into this project and this initiative? It is what we need to fundamentally rewire how it is that we operate and think about what we're doing here. Because I'm not setting up a shop at a At a state fair trying to sell as many soft pretzels as I can to people walking by. We are creating a really cool machine that enables outcomes, outcomes for people who we want to support. And we get to decide, like, who is this machine optimized for? Because it cannot be optimized for every type of entrepreneur. Let's build a machine that we are proud of, but one that continues to grow because we all continue to grow. You don't give somebody an inflation bump price increase at the end of the year when you're investing in yourself. The people who do that are the ones that are living the same 12 months on repeat for decades. They're not changing, they're not growing. They go to like some technical training and get the minimum amount of CPE and they charge their clients inflation bumps every single year. Man. If you are listening to this podcast, you are, you are investing in yourself and growing as a result. Our business, the things we're capable of, it is, it is outpacing inflation. Let's just say that thought number six here. I kind of already spoiled this one. The market is vastly bigger than we think. The reality is there are thousands of people out there who would very happily embrace your approach. Oftentimes we can fall into serving a set of clients where we're like, man, I don't even like these people. I don't even agree with their vision for this, that or the other thing. But they're the people that we have. And so you can end up feeling trapped serving folks you don't even really want to serve. And we, we give into this, I think, because we don't realize how much power we have and how specific of like, communities we can reach. And like most people have like some weird thing that they are super, super into. And, and maybe the best thing the Internet has enabled is being able to, you know, bring those people together. I love the show Arrested Development had a guy on there, Tobias Fun, who was a self proclaimed never nude. And the infliction was exactly what it sounds like. And so under his clothes he wore 24,7 cut off denim shorts, showered in them, bathed in them. At one point he c, he gets called out for this and he's like, there are others like me. There are, there are dozens of them. The Internet has created a place for people like this in a way that we've never had before. And it's problematic actually in a bunch of ways. Like it means you can make your own little echo chamber. And we've all seen versions of that. But from an Entrepreneurial standpoint, it means there's so many more people available to us than ever before. If we can get specific enough with what we're talking about, and not just talking about bookkeeping and tax, but talking about what are the problems for these very specific types of people that we can solve If. Have you been consuming my stuff for a while? I mean, we've been putting out content for three or four years now. Would it surprise you to learn that most of the folks that turn up to my live events will tell me, just found your stuff, you know, within the last six months. And every bit of content that we make is still kind of made through the lens, for the most part of assume this is the first time somebody ever sees you, because this is the really wild thing. Probably, you know, it depends on the channel, but probably 50% of the people who will see a social media post from me, that is the first time they ever see anything from me. Every single time. We had a YouTube video that went really big recently, the ChatGPT agent mode one. 80% of the people who watched that video have never seen anything from me before. And content is all I've been doing for the last four years now. Wild to think about. You can put in that much time and still the majority of people who see your thing every time you're out there have never seen you, don't know that you exist. I've shared this story a number of times, going and speaking. Who was it? It was Massachusetts, Massachusetts State Society at a conference of theirs. Room of about 400 people. We're talking about tech selection and all that. And I said, you know, who here has heard of carbon, the practice management system? Who is, you know, if you're plugged into kind of online accounting stuff is unavoidable. They're everywhere. Been around for like almost 15 years now. Room of 400 people. Two people raised their hand for having ever heard of carbon. And so if you're plugged into the online stuff like most of you probably are, that just seems unthinkable, right? But those people, they don't know that world exists. They don't know that I exist until I stand there and give them that talk. And it means however small we think in a total addressable market or a specific problem is, it's actually much bigger than we realize. There's much more, more people out there who would be very excited about your approach. The people that are on the client list today, you know, those, those hundred clients, whatever it is, we got to acknowledge that of all of the people in the world who most acutely feel the pains we solve, where they will cut a big old check to pay you with a smile on their face. That 100 client roster you got today, if we zoom out, those are not the 100 people in the world who would most value you. So we got to, we got to put some effort into this. Trusting in kind of the bigness of the world and our ability to find folks with specific problems to continually upgrade that client list. Because our accounting firm is only ever as good as the client list, right? It's not about how am I going to find that next hire. It's not about if I can only solve this one tech integration problem. It's about who are the clients on your list, what are they willing to pay you? Because that client that comes in and feels those pains more acutely and will happily pay you twice as much. Sweet. We can now go cut two or three legacy projects. Our staffing constraints just got a lot better. Our systems issues, which are usually just capacity issues in disguise, right? We're not over capacity. We just got to find better software, man. It all boils down to the client list. And the world is so big, even though we are like programmed to be hermits because we're accountants, if we can just get out there and let people know we exist, you'll find a very specific type of person. All right, Number seven, the world is big enough for your spare specificity. I just blew that one open already. The definition of niche, in my opinion, the last 10 years has vastly changed. You could run a niche firm for, you know, dental clinics back in the day, pre Internet, and get all the dental clinics in town. Get them kind of in, you know, adjacent, adjacent cities and, you know, within 100 mile radius, you're the only one just serving dental clinics. You can build a pretty good business these days. Dental, in my opinion, it's not a niche or it's. It's not as niche as it could be. I don't see. I really. In fact, I don't use the word niche very much anymore. I just think of it as specialization. And specialization is a spectrum. Niche feels too binary to me because, yes, like a firm that just serves dentists, that is much more specialized than a generalist firm. But we are just scratching the surface if all we say is dental, right? So if you're thinking about, you know, real estate or E commerce or like, what is two levels beyond that? Because you'll actually find that's an easier business to run. It's easier to Find those people and they'll pay you more. Unless it's like, you know, a crappy specialization where these folks don't have any money or they don't value the work or something like that. Generally, the deeper you go, the more they'll pay and the easier it is to find them. Last one, number eight. Recognize that the best version of this, if we're actually doing it right, it should feel uncomfortable. We shouldn't shy away from that like that. That it's actually a good signal if you go back to, you know, doing renewals and price increases and stuff like that, if that feels comfortable, may going to lose your shorts. It's going to be a tough year. The best version of that, it's very uncomfortable, right? So like, let's not try to run to comfort. Running to comfort probably means we're not evolving. We're not, you know, advocating for our own vision of the future, which may be a little bit at odds with where things are at today. And then you find is the funny thing with price increases, you will find you go through some really hard, really scary changes. And then 18 months down the road, you look back at what you were doing 18 months prior and you're like, wow, we were just giving it away back then. We just. I can't believe we were even doing that. That thing that 18 months ago you were terrified to do, that felt like this huge, ambitious, intimidating thing you will find so quickly. On the other side of that, when you look back at that, you're like, oh, but that's table stakes as nothing. And so right now, with where you're at today, if you think to yourself, 18 months in the future, let's live in service of that person. Right. In fact, that person's a whole lot more important than the clients on your client list. The clients on your client list matter. Yes. Like they are paying the bills. But are you going to let us see or a clients talk us out of something that 18 months future Jason would be like, nobody. That's the right move. That's the person we're ultimately serving or we should be anyways. Again, I didn't mean for you to start out the week feeling attacked. This is me angrily shouting at like six years ago Jason. I just, I just decided to record it. Okay. Any other thoughts, lessons you've learned on your journey on that stuff? Pop that down in the comments, buddy. Thanks for being here. Great to see you. Looking sharp, looking smart. See you in the next one. Sa.