518 Is AI Making Junior Accountants Turn Off Their Brains?

Gang, my eyes, my eyes have been opened. I put out the question on my newsletter last week. Goes out to about 11,000 accountants. I said, if you're looking to sell your firm, reply. But I also said, if you're looking to buy a firm reply. I didn't get a single reply for folks looking to sell, but I got so many replies for people looking to buy. Demand is far out running supply right now. What does that mean for you? Is this something that you should actually consider? You may not be planning on selling your firm at all, but is this like bitcoin peeking or something like that? Like, is this something we need to be thinking about so we're going to talk about today is considering selling your firm even if you didn't have that on the roadmap. The very best part of being an accountant is that whatever you're thinking of doing, whatever you're planning, if it doesn't work out, you can always go back to being an accountant. I tell that to people that are on the fence about starting a firm or doing some weird off the wall venture or committing to a niche or something like that. It's like, you know what, like we have so much to be thankful for. Like we are in so, so much demand that, that if you can instead flip the mental model to how do I plan for the downside? Like if I instead focus on what's the worst possible thing that can happen here and, and plan around that, you actually find it's a lot less scary because opportunity seems to abound like just about anywhere you look. If you have any sort of experience. I think if there's, if there's any part of the accounting profession that is hard to get into or any stage where it's difficult, it's probably when you just don't have any experience yet. But anybody that's got man like bookkeeping, controllership experience, any amount of tax experience in the US you get gobbled up so fast. And increasingly, I would say the same applies for accounting firms because there are a lot of people ready to gobble up your accounting firm. And another thing I was surprised by as I asked each of these people, like what are you looking for specifically? Like what are the attributes of the firm that would make it a good target? The bar isn't super high. There's considerations like, you know, they don't want a super legacy firm where it's going to require totally pulling out all the tech and the processes and all that and then getting the people trained on the new approach. Because as we've talked about on the pod quite a bit. That is a much bigger project than it often seems from the outside. But beyond that, like the folks I've talked to, they're not all that particular. And so it begs the question, if you're running a firm right now, don't act like yet. Don't act like you haven't thought about it. What would I do? And it's kind of similar to the thought experiment of like, what if I burned half the business down right now, cut half the clients, cut half the staff. Wouldn't that just be a better business? And the answer is almost always yes. You've thought about it before. You're like, what could I, what could I get for this thing? You've considered it, or at the very least you've thought about, if I started again tomorrow from scratch, here is what I would do different. And if there's an argument for prematurely, prematurely selling your firm, it's probably this. It's that, you know, the second time you wouldn't make a lot of the same mistakes. To be clear, you'd find new ones to make. But the second time is going to feel infinitely easier. And there may be, you know, like a, you know. Tim Ferriss Four Hour Workweek popularized the idea of many retirements throughout your career. Rather than building to this ambiguous thing, when you turn 60 or 65 and just hope you have enough money in the bank account and you just leverage everything, you know, against that, that whole approach, I mean, that always felt kind of flawed for me, but me and my life. When my dad retired on the way home of his last day, went to the doctor, they said he got a 30% chance of living the next year. And he was definitely that I'm going to sacrifice everything now in order to get an early retirement or something sort of guy and boy, if, if that doesn't put things in perspective for you, then I don't know what will. He's, he's fine now, but maybe this is like the accounting entrepreneur equivalent of having many retirements. The notion that, that maybe that's like not a thing you do in 2025 necessarily still set up an accounting firm with the plan of running it for decades, just in the same way that, you know, you don't have, you know, that person, that's a, that's a company man that goes and proudly works for Ford or whatever your accounting firm's name is for 30 or 40 years. And I get like the romance of that still. Like, it's not to say that that's not alluring. But there's a very practical question of like, is that like on a. In a strict sense the optimized way to go through my career? I don't actually know, like, if, if you, the rest of your career plan on running accounting firms is the most optimized way to do that, sticking with the one that you've got until the very end? Or is it going through some evolutions, maybe experiencing a couple different things to better equip you to be able to do this? So actually, four things I think you could do after selling your firm, each of which have pros and cons. Number one, we already talked about it. Start another firm. But now, buddy, you got capital, you got some relationships, you got a bit of Runway. You are starting that firm under completely different conditions than you likely started your first firm. Where you're like, buddy, I gotta put food on the table. I will do just about anything to bring clients in the door. Now you got that level of sexy indifference that you didn't have before where you're like, I don't need you. And so you can like play a little slower and bring in the better paying work. Maybe approach this in a more specific way, trying to serve a more specific type of person because you've got the time to invest in that. Maybe you got the people skills to go out, do a little hobnobbing and meet the people that could potentially become your clients. I can tell you a very practical consideration here. You know, for me, young, younger in my career, when you are younger than 30 or 35, and maybe that number's even bigger when all of the mature business owners, not all, but the vast majority of them, are old enough to be your dad or your grandfather, that's a very difficult business to build. We have all like, man, if you came up in an accounting firm and you are a high performer, we've all experienced a version of this where the client will only talk to the gray haired partner. Then the partner gets off the phone and they're like, was that right what I said? Can you, how does this and that work? Can you go unwind all those things that I just told them and, and tell me what I just said was right and wrong because sweet cheeks can't be trusted in front of the client. The client won't take them seriously. Right. And that is a real limitation if you are going out and starting your own thing. It's not to say that it can't be overcome, but this was actually a consideration for me. And coming into ownership in My firm and making the decision that I wanted to work on the firm, not on the client work is at that stage the greatest contribution I could have to the firm was in the strategy of how the firm ran, of attracting talent. Like I could still bring in folks that were many years my senior and get them excited about what we were doing and all that. But, but taking that baby face out in public and trying to attract 55 year old business owners when you are 28 or 33, like that is very hard. At least the traditional way where they are sizing you up and they don't have any other context. I would say actually social media and sort of the advent of everybody consuming new media rather than old media makes this a little bit easier because you can establish yourself more as more of an expert on merit rather than them making those judgments based on other factors. Like we talked about with the partner making decisions based on gray hair rather than do they have a reputation, have they helped a lot of people. So if you sold your firm, you could start another firm and that process, it would probably look completely different. And there's something about that that I think would be a fun experience. But second thing you can do, you go out buy somebody else's firm. Because let me tell you, that is a completely different type of challenge. This is what I did when I bought the firm. It was, it was about a $3 million practice. Historically it just been run by a bunch of very traditional partners. Over the 80 years that had been open, there had been, you know, 15 or 20 partners through there. And so the firm was just a product of, of all of that. I mean they've never done anything besides hourly billing. The partners were the client facing. People like the staff were not by and large were not allowed to talk to the clients. And so you had staff that were perfectly happy sitting in the back of the office because that is what the partners hired them to do. But then he come in and man like that's, it's very hard to build a firm that way anymore because increasingly the back office is being automated. The back office is being offshored and the value of your onshore team these days, like it is in relationship management. So the space for the number crunchers sitting in the back of the office, that continues to shrink while the, the human skills get more and more valuable. And AI is just taking us in that direction even more. Even if you're not bought into offshore stuff, look at what AI is doing. AI is going to compress all the actual doing of the work. What's going to be left. It's going to be the relationships, it's going to be who you know it's going to be. How much trust do they have in your ability to get that stuff done correctly? And the people that can nail that are the ones with people skills. We've all seen folks with tremendous sales and people skills, but. But no technical chops. You don't want that advice to be paper thin. But we've also seen the other end of the spectrum where you have technical experts that like, can't build a business, that can't be reasonable about like materiality stuff. And as with, I mean, most professions, kids are put through school to do the technical stuff. Like when you are a dentist going through dental school, nobody tells you how to run a dental practice. When you're accountant going through accountant school. That's what they call it still, right? Accountant school. Honestly, they're priming you. Usually they're priming you to go to big four. And so you're getting the technical stuff. The expectation is you're going to be a cog in the machine. Your guidance counselor didn't say, ah, people skills. I see that in you. Let me walk you down to the accounting department. If anything, they do the opposite, right? Oh, don't like people so much. Maybe you'll like these numbers better. That is a real struggle in stepping into a legacy firm is the staff, like, more often than not, have not been empowered to manage client relationships. And so when you step into that traditional firm, you're stepping into the role of the big boss, who in most firms is positioned as like the hero, the person between the client and the staff, the one who will swoop in when something doesn't go according to plan, the one that the client knows they can always call if anything goes a little bit off. But to get away from that traditional partnership model means building like an actual org chart, like having managers not just having partners with each of their own little fiefdoms, but having a proper org chart. In our firm, that meant finding folks in the staff that could rise up to the level of, of being those managers. And that was tricky just because they'd spent the last decade or two being told like, no, just get back and go do the accounting work, go do the tax work. We're not really going to invest in you. We just want you to crank out the work at a high enough realization level. Now those firms are everywhere right now, and there's a lot of folks that say there's so many people retiring that this is a reason to buy an old, retiring person's firm. I actually don't think that those two things are connected at all. The fact that there's a bunch of people leaving the profession doesn't really have all that big of an impact on me. When I'm doing the calculation of am I better off launching my own thing or better off starting with somebody else's thing. The reality is, and this is also a product of your confidence, the reality is you are thinking about, how do I pay the bills for the next six months? And people who are supremely confident in being able to go out and find clients and do all this stuff, 10 times out of 10, they will say, I don't want the friction of other people's messes and all that. I just need to build this thing myself. And if you've got, you know, the capital to give you some Runway to do that, if you've got the confidence from, from past stuff that you've done, to know that I'm going to be able to go out and, and be the rainmaker, that's great. But most people, especially the first time they're doing it, they don't have that confidence. So sometimes this is where an acquisition can help you get over the hump. Even though it is somebody else's thing, it can be what bootstraps you, building your own thing. Because those clients that you bought, you don't need to keep. All those clients are doing is paying the bills. Until you feel like you've got a path to something that is more your own, you could certainly keep those clients. The fact that you paid for those clients, it is not a reason to keep them. The job of that book of business is to extend the Runway. And along the way, you're going to find the version of the firm that you're more excited to build. Maybe that's a more specific type of person you want to work with, just a different way of working. But until you get into it, you don't know what you want. And so even if you did sell your firm today, there are plenty of firms out there that you could step straight back into. And that would be an entirely different type of challenge. Hey, something super interesting that I recently learned while I was in Australia, you know how when you flush the toilet, it goes the opposite way? The same thing applies to accounting, actually. Our debits in Australia are their credits. Like, it goes the other way. And this kind of blew my mind when I started talking with people because, I don't know, I just, I guess assume. I assumed it was the same everywhere, but it's not. Can you believe that? Do you believe that? No, don't believe that. That is obviously not true. You know why? Because accounting is a universal language. It is like love. It doesn't matter where in the world you are, we all speak it the same way. Which is why incoming sponsors segue. Which is why services like Cloud Accountant Staffing are so helpful. Because they can find accountants for you anywhere in the world. And I'm just gonna say it, if you are struggling to find us born snowflake accountants to come and work for you, like I struggled with finding folks elsewhere in the world that'll come and do the work that that might be the move for you. Now, Cloud Accountant Staffing is run by a former accounting firm owner. It's not like a fly by night weirdo dude that's reaching out to you on LinkedIn. They can help you find accountants in the Philippines and Latin America and South Africa. But you could do all three and run a 24. 7 accounting firm. Oh my gosh, she didn't think about that. Got people like working 24 hours a day. That'd be kind of fun. It's some logistical challenges to that anyways. Cloud Accountant Staffing also has a platform where you can hop in and self service and see applicants and schedule interviews or with them directly. Pretty cool stuff. Very legit group. I actually know a large number of firms that are very happy users. You'll see this squad out at all the accounting conferences this year. So if this is something that you're exploring, definitely worth chatting with. Cloud Accountant Staffing if you haven't done it before, you're gonna have a bunch of ignorant questions like I did. Like that's just how it is. That's also the value of a group like this is they can hold your hand through that. Everything from like, how does security work? What are the disclosures I need to put in front of my clients? How do I do it with an international team. Like all very important blockers to work through. But if you want some help, chat with the folks at Cloud Accountant Staffing. Link down in the show notes. If you've ever seen my tech selection pyramid, it's basically like Maslow's hierarchy of picking out tech in your accounting firm. Because picking your firm in the right order is very important. You start with the foundational tools and then you layer in the automation stuff on top of it. And wouldn't it be nice if your foundational tools could just do all of that stuff Stuff One of today's sponsors, Client Hub, they're trying to do just this smooshing, several of those layers together because they're a practice management system but they're also doing really cool month end close automation stuff for bookkeeping practices. So you get all the practice management goodies to like manage all aspects of the firm. But it's got a super deep integration with QBO0 and has like a step by step process for managing every aspect of the close. Even like some cool stuff stuff like pulling in uncategorized transactions and you can push those straight out as a client task all inside of Client Hub. Core part of Client Hub is kind of having like this two sided task management system where there's the work that you do and anytime you need the client to do something, you push that task to them. Because the reality of getting work done in an accounting firm get it worked together, we're most often blocked by this stuff that we need from clients, right? So pulling that all together into one system and doing some cool month end close automation stuff all in one place. Client Hub is doing a really cool version of that now. And if you're a bookkeeping practice, it ought to be on your short list of PMs to look at. To learn more about Client Hub, check out the link down in the show notes one that frankly is like the least sexy of these options to me. And so the third option here is to look at at roll ups. This is a whole trend, you know, of, of private equity building these, these platforms and acquiring all these firms and quote unquote economies of scale. And this is all going to come together and it's going to be great. The reality of what happens in most of these is it's actually all just the firm still operating on their own. All they're doing is trying to do this, this arbitrage of getting to certain size thresholds where then those firms can be repackaged and sold to a different group at a greater multiple. Like it's literally just the shell game of, of trying to get to that next threshold to get, you know, someone else to value it even more now because we're, you know, over 100 million or whatever that threshold is. And it's why oftentimes when these acquisitions happen, it's like all the communications is hey man, nothing's changing. Like which it's no big deal. It's going to be a behind the scenes thing. Business as usual as far as you're concerned, buddy. Some platforms, and this is the minority of them, they're coming in and they're saying like hey, no, we've actually got a way that we want to do this and all the firms are pulling into it. Everybody's going to adhere to this specific approach, this sort of methodology and vision for the future and what an accounting firm looks like. That's the more interesting version of this to me. I would love to see more small firm operators get into this. The notion of being the facilitator of pulling together several firms. It doesn't mean that you need to buy the previous owners out necessarily. But as people's personal networks I think now have, have grown thanks to the Internet and our ability to just interact with more other firm owners, you can see more commonalities and the, the, the firms that you kind of befriend and there's going to be situations where it makes sense to pull some of that stuff together. It's, it's still got to be somebody's job. And this is where these will fall apart sometimes is if you have a few different owners and they all come together, but the coming together it is work. And if everybody already has full time jobs and they're at their limit just running their firms, it's very hard to allocate the time that it takes to actually bring all that stuff together in an effective way. But if you sold your firm and this sort of like top level stuff is interesting to you, I think there is a, a smaller scale version than, you know, the PE, $100 million plus roll ups. I think there's a smaller scale version of this right now that's interesting that you could explore. Last one I got here, number four, you sell your firm. The fourth thing you could do, get into coaching other firms. And I know, trust me, nobody hates somebody telling you what to do who doesn't actually do that thing more than accountants. Did that make sense? I could tell you this though. I get so many requests every week for, from folks that want to have a quote, good coach to work with and they're just not out there, man. There's not many of them and many of them have very outdated skill sets now where they haven't run a firm in 10 or 15 years. They don't know what it looks like to run a firm in an age where everybody's doing remote work. How do I, how do I know they're working if they're at home or how to run a firm in an, in an age of AI where tech is changing really, really fast. And what we need to be asking of our teams is like developing this sort of new skill set if you've been out of the game for a long time, that that's a hard thing to keep up with. Even just the modernization of tech and accounting firms in the last decade with cloud practice management systems and what a, what a new, more progressive tech stack looks like. Unless you've gone through that yourself, that's a, That's a tricky thing to get your head around. And most coaches that are still out there, in my experience, at least a lot of the ones that I've. I've talked with, they're far enough removed from running firm stuff like the actual running of the firm, that, that a lot's changed in that time. And I find in coaching a lot of times it will go more abstract, more business therapist, more, let's talk about your headspace, because that's all there is. Because, like, they're not close enough to it to have that very tactical perspective on what to do in situation X, Y and Z. And so the further you get from the nuance of it, the more you kind of have to abstract what that advice is. There are some really good coaches out there. What I'm saying is there isn't enough of them. And if we're talking about like many retirements or you sell your firm and I'm like, man, I am fried. I'm going to take a couple of years off. A pretty darn cool thing to do in the meantime, in those couple of years, help some other firms doesn't mean you're going to do it forever. In fact, if you do it forever, I think you lose, you lose the sauce a little bit because you get more removed from it. But there's a lot of folks out there that are looking for a good coach. I put this out on social media the other day. I ran a poll, I said, if I ran another accounting firm, quote, for the content, that is, I ran a firm, we documented it with the goal of, of making that as helpful as possible so that folks could see my journey to sort of then have a more clear path towards what that could look like for them. If I ran another firm for the content, which of these would you like to see? I said, should I launch one from scratch? Buy. Buy someone else's firm, roll firms up into a platform or don't do it. Just, just keep being an Internet grifter. 52% said launch one from scratch. Next biggest was buy another firm at 25%. A lot of folks in the comments very concerned for me personally, they said this seems like too much, Jason. And you're right, it is way too much. If I did that, I'd have to. A lot of things would have to change. But I would be coming into it with, with probably a different mindset than most where it would not be a long term thing for me. Like, I would be looking at what is a, what's an exit look like in, in three to five years max. Because for me the exercise of doing it would be like to show the path for other folks. It would not be to like build this giant thing long term. Most people, their journey into this is going to be like, man, I just, I. First and foremost, I want to own my own business for the first time and I want to get to what my W2 was last year for the first time. They're not interested in like how fast can I scale to $10 million? Like the vast majority of people coming in to run accounting firms as, as it should be, they should be looking at like, how do I create a cool place for people to work and that includes myself and make enough money so that I don't have to work these 60, 80, 100 hour weeks and become a slave to, to kind of the machine that I built. Right. That's probably the most appealing version of this to me is as getting to that. Like, I don't think it has to be a big sweaty thing getting to what is a firm where I can support my family. If I want, I can hire some people to come work for me and pay them very well. What would it look like to build something like that? I honestly think the biggest thing holding people back on this is like confidence and self belief that you can pull it off. And I know like going down this path, I would definitely have a different level of confidence than the person that hasn't done it before. And I think that's contagious. Like, that may be the best thing that I can offer people is here are the frameworks that we talk about. Here's like a very explicit version of this and let's follow it and see what works and what doesn't work. And no matter how specific you get about like your approach, there will always be people that will try to pick it apart and say, well, it only worked because of this, it only worked because of that. Like, someone in the comments raised a good question, you know, how much capital are you going to allow yourself to do this? Because most people have no capital to get this thing going. I think to make it an entertaining version of launching a firm from scratch, I Think you got to bootstrap it. I think you got to do it within the credit card limit, basically, and find a way to get it off the ground. Because again, that, that would be the point of the exercise is how do we do this in a way that folks can relate to, to say, I'm in this position, I see what they did, and I could see doing a version of that for myself. Like that's the most helpful version of that. Right. Um, I was surprised how many people said, go out and buy another firm. And the main justification I was seeing was there's so many people retiring, you can go out and get these, these firms for next to nothing. And the whole turnaround story would be interesting. But I still come back to, I think the attractiveness of buying someone else's firm is. How do I say this? I don't want to sound mean at all, but I think it is a reflection of what confidence do you have in being able to build your own thing. If you were like, I'm Fairly certain in 24 months I could go out and have like a $3 million niche firm that I'd built from scratch. Like, if that's a thing that you think you can confidently do, you are never going to look at this half million dollar legacy firm that you can get for, you know, 50% of revenue. Like, you're not going to mess with any of that stuff if you see a direct path for yourself. And not everybody can see that path. Like, this is arguably the power of doing a reset. Like selling, selling your firm and just trying to do something new from scratch is the fact you'll have a different level of competence, you can go about it a different way. I wouldn't do that to avoid like the hard things that need to happen inside of your accounting firm. Like, I wouldn't not cut my legacy clients that I need to cut and instead just sell the entire business because those same problems will crop up in a new firm. You're not going to nail your client selection in the beginning. The firm's going to grow. Like, that's just a product of a healthy firm. Is you're finding more painful problems, more expensive problems that you can solve for folks. And that evolution, that's healthy, but you're uniquely suited to do a cool version of that. If you've already built a firm in the past. A lot of times when folks are thinking about niching, they're like, what if I get sick of this business that I build around this very specific avatar? Well, I mean, you've Got a super profitable business that's very valuable that somebody would happily buy. Is that, that really the worst case scenario that we need to be planning for? Were I to go down that path, it would definitely be like serving a specific type of client because I still like. I had a YouTube comment yesterday on a, on a video about pricing that was like, I understand like your approach for best practices for how to present pricing on, on your website, but I can't do that because I'm still new and man, that's a, it's a big misconception for folks thinking about going out and doing their own thing that you have to start wide, that you have to start being willing to do anything for everybody and then hold yourself out that way that you are this generalist, which is by the way the hardest way to stand out. We did a roast affirm maybe a year or two ago about someone that just went out and I think all they did was worked with. It was a very specific type of retail store. I think we, I think we decided we couldn't say what it was because then it'd be easy to find the person. But it was a very, very specific type of retail store that was all they worked with. And they did that from day one and they did that by going to conferences. They had a couple personal relationships in the space. They set up a great website that had some like a really awesome free resource for the folks that ran this sort of business. And very quickly they became the go to for folks inside of this space just by getting out there a little bit and being visible. And this was a brand new firm and on the outside like by and large people don't know the difference between your itty bitty little brand new firm and like some bigger, more mature firm. You know, perception from the client. On the outside, perception is reality. And if you can become the default for that type of person, it makes it infinitely defined, it makes it infinitely easier to find clients even, even when you are just getting started. But again that requires some confidence to like trust that that's going to happen. If I go out and I'm walking around at trade shows and talking with the software companies in the space to see how I can support them, that sort of thing. You know what I was just thinking about? Just how much I accommodated my clients. Crappy old banks that just created so many workflow nightmares for us. This is, this is an ad read for Mercury. Just so you know, literally having clients share their password with you so you could log into a client's account to a bank, having to have them send you two FA codes, little two FA codes where the text literally says never share this two FA code with anybody. So many problems with that. Don't get me wrong, like it's an essential part of delivering like bookkeeping work. But then I would be so apologetic like, yeah, no, I'm sorry. This is such a headache. I wish it didn't suck like this. Gang, there are solutions for this. Like Mercury. I literally ditched a traditional bank and use Mercury now myself. The client gives you firm access and then you assign use user access for the people in your firm and it can get super, super granular, like the way that user management actually should be. So next time when you get that stupid situation with a client that is not secure and they're annoyed about two FA Olympics, just remind them, buddy, this is, there's a, there's a solution to this. We can help you with this. We'll help you make the switch to Mercury. You'll have a vastly better experience, get a bunch of razzle dazzle features your, your traditional bank doesn't have. But then we can lock it down with proper access to whoever needs access to it. So the next time they complain, don't apologize, say here's the solution. Do you want us to help you through it? Think about it. All right. To learn more about Mercury, check out the link down in the show notes today's episode. It is brought to you in part by MakerSub. MakerSub is an accounts payable platform, the one that is going like super hard on AI. Really good for large 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 but also the subsequent approval workloads. Really, really cool. MakerSub 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 post 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 of a great tool to do it with. To learn more, check out the link down in the show notes. One other good idea from the comments, A instead do like a Kitchen Nightmares Gordon Ramsay type of show where you go into other people's underperforming firms, shout at people, flip things over, that sort of thing. I don't know that I could yell at underachieving accountants. I mean, you think. I just think about an underachieving accounting firm, what that office environment looks like. You go in, you got a whole bunch of career accountants that are just like, man, can I just, can you just let me try to get to my lunch break? And here I am like dressing people down. I don't know that that would be like uplifting, positive motivational content. I also don't know that I could change anything. It is very hard to get like stodgy career accountants to change their ways. Who knows, it could all be in the editing. I'm sure in Kitchen Nightmares you got a whole bunch of people where it's like you really going to like change who that person is just by shouting at them. Now, last consideration on this, the notion of, of selling your firm, doing this mini retirement, not taking that firm, you know, all the way into your 60s or whenever you're going to, going to hang up the 10 key. Last consideration here is like, how do we do this without burning the folks that you brought on along the way. And this has always been my biggest blocker with, with selling out is that it feels like just that it is all of the people that have most bought into my vision for running a firm and you know, their livelihoods is dependent upon me and, and upon the business. And we will glorify the best case scenario as you just getting to bounce with a pile of cash and leave all those people flapping in the breeze. Because the vast majority of, of acquisitions, huge percentage of the clients bounce, a huge percentage of the staff bounces. We've all seen this where you, it's, it's, you know, when, when a regional does an acquisition of a small firm that usually just doesn't end well for anybody. But besides the person that was able to cash out, that is. And sometimes even for them, it doesn't end well. But I think there's a better version of this. We've talked about it on the podcast before, is there a peer that runs a similar firm to you or where them acquiring your firm actually makes sense? Like, like it may actually be better. You may actually be able to build a cooler business with those two firms combined. That's a thing. You come in, you're like, oh, we're using the same practice management system. We're serving a similar client base. Some of our weaknesses are some of your strengths. Like, there's a world there where those two businesses actually work better together. So can you find that it super helps having a peer network? Because then your optionality, it's, it's extended actually well beyond the folks that are actively looking to buy a firm. Talked with a bunch of folks who had no intention on buying a firm until like one of their friends or something like that, you know, has kind of a change of heart and they're like, I want to do something else. And they're like, this is actually a firm that I would buy given the opportunity. So if you have that network, it certainly helps. But then the folks that you're leaving, like the people on your team, I mean, there's definitely a world where this is a good financial outcome for them as well. And usually a condition of these buyouts is going to be the team sticking around for a while. And so if, if you are not taking 100% of that cash, the deal yourself, I am almost certain that there's a version of that deal that you could craft that would make everybody happy. And the North Star here to me is, at the end of the day, like, where is your energy taking you? I don't think we think about this enough, just that we're at our best when the thing that we're doing we are super energized to do. We are super excited about it. And we oftentimes don't give ourselves permission to follow that because maybe it feels too at odds with the track that you've set yourself on, which just feels even worse because it's like, oh, it's my fault now I gotta follow through on this. You know, this is where hiring can really help. As you evolve as a person, the things that you once drew energy from, those are going to change. And the first time you have to learn how to hire somebody to do that thing, that's really hard. The first time you build a sales team, the first time you, you hire a team of people that can prepare an accurate tax return or a month end close or something like that, the first time you do that stuff, it is very, very Hard. But the reality is your energy and excitement, it's never going to be completely static, like it's going to evolve. And if we give ourselves permission to evolve in that way, we become more capable because we learn how to fill in those gaps around us then. But then we are operating within the zone of what we are really, really excited about, which is where we are at our best. And for a lot of people their best right now it's not clocking in to the machine that they've built. And that could be for any number of 100 reasons. It could just be that you're burnt out, could be that you built a machine now that you realize you're not that excited to run anymore. And so I guess if you hear one thing, you are not trapped. You are still an accountant. Worst case scenario, you can go back to being an accountant. And if we open ourselves up to a little bit more diversity and experience like this makes you a more capable entrepreneur, a more well rounded person. Especially if like the North Star is to keep you operating in the zone of what you are most excited about. I can tell you what that is for me right now it is live events. Like I absolutely love live events and getting people out in person where we are announcing a big old slate of events this fall in the coming days if it hasn't happened already. One thing I can share this week I'm going to be in Salt Lake City running a little event. If you're in the city of Salt or within a couple hour drive of their head over to Jason on firms.com/events to find more information there. We'll we'll be running upwards of 20 live events between now and the end of the year all over the country, a little bit outside the country. I would love to see you there. This is the thing I'm most passionate about, creating cool in person experiences for people. Because it is on the back of some cool in person experiences that my life has been most impacted. Like my turning points were when I met the right person at the right time. That unlocked something for me and I just love being the one to create the space where people can come together and that happens organically. We've done a decent amount of it this year, 10 or 20 events. And the cool thing about turning up to a city is I can bring a bunch of people together and you're going to meet a bunch of people who live right across town, you'd never seen them before and you leave with their cell phone number like you got some new friends, some folks to have lunch with, like not just online friends, Internet friends, but actual like in person friends that you can hang out with. And whenever we've done this, like the energy has just been off the charts. Like everybody's super excited to be there. I always like the trap is over programming these events. But then like everybody gets to hanging out and vibing and it's like you like you end up getting in the way because everybody's having a good time and you're like, no, like y' all got to sit back down. We've got more programming to get the CPE when the best version of those things is like a little bit of both, I think some programming, but also giving folks prompts to like kind of talk through what they're dealing with with each other and all that. These events are going to be a mix of stuff going on at conferences and around conferences as well as our own like first party workshops that we are running. So that usually looks like an afternoon workshop from 1 to 5 that rolls into a dinner. The dinner group's going to be smaller than the workshop group just because logistics, you can't get that many people into a dinner. But we're going to be announcing a whole bunch of cities here very soon. I would love, love, love, love to see you out live, bring out some of the team, man, if there's one thing of value I can do for you, inspiring your team, getting them energized about what you're doing. Oh man, if you've been to events much, you know what it feels like to be jazzed and really excited about something and then go back to the office, back to working with your team and you're like, oh, we're just like straight back into the norm. This is the value of like getting your team out to events is the way better version of that is when your team around you is inspired and stuff just happens. It's not you through sheer force of will making things happen. But if you, if you bring some of your team along and they get exposed to these high level conversations and they have their own ideas and they're operating at their best, that's really, really exciting. And I'm like, this is not your tax senior, it's not your partner. This can literally be the admin, the person answering the phone. I don't care who it is. The more we can expose them to other people and new ideas and that new sort of fresh energy, the easier it makes your life. So I'd encourage you to think about bringing out folks, folks from your team as well in support of you. Anyways, lots more info to come on that. If you're not listening to this right away, it's probably already live on jasononfirms.com events. Would love to see you in person. Until then, I'll catch you in the next one.