520 Don’t Run A Paid Ad for your Accounting Firm Until You Watch This

The number of firms I see being hoodwinked by marketing agencies that want to come in and run paid ads for your firm, man, it is still so, so common. And to be clear, paid ads, they have a place in an accounting firm. I don't care if you are at capacity, if you have, you know, never spent a dollar on advertising, which we like to, to pride ourselves on. There's a reason that paid ads work. But I cannot tell you how many firms have come to me and said we have spent tens of thousands of dollars with marketing agencies and, and seen virtually nothing from it. So today let's run through how to actually do this right and actually put out content that converts that people will engage with. Coming from someone who kind of does this right, like this is, this is my main grift now, is being able to make content that people will engage with. So let's get into what the marketing agencies just don't understand about working with accounting firms. Okay, first things first. Most marketing agencies, what they get paid is a percentage of your budget of whatever money that you want to put out into the ether in the form of paid ads. Which means they are going to sell you on doing paid ads. As long as you have a budget to put towards paid ads, they're not paid. When you get clients, usually they're going to be paid based on like how much money we are pumping through meta ads or LinkedIn or whatever that looks like. And so it's just worth acknowledging off the top, if that's the model, don't expect them to be like, you know, I don't think we found it yet because they're going to keep milking that thing as long as they're getting paid. But a great argument for paid ads in accounting firms is the average value of the customer that you can attract like, compared to many other businesses is kind of astronomical. Like, we are in largely B2B services. We're billing successful entrepreneurs oftentimes a lot of money for what they do, which means the value of a client over their lifetime to your firm. It's, it's sky high compared to a window washing business, compared to many businesses that you see pumping so much money into paid ads. So there is absolutely a place for paid ads. But how do we do it right? I'm going to give you 10 things you got to think about. You got to nail down before it makes sense to do paid ads. Because at their best, paid ads are kind of the perfect way to like pour gasoline on whatever the cool thing you've built is that's, that's not a good analogy to, to accelerate the cool thing you've built. Because it is, I mean it's the most amazing money machine ever. The fact that you can rock up with any amount of money to met, to LinkedIn, to Twitter, whatever it's going to be, give them a pile of money, tell them who you want the ads to go to and then they report back when the money's all gone and you're like, did we get anything from this or not? And we're just going to blindly trust the platform. They did run all those ads. It's, it's shocking. But if you have something that works, this is where you see, I mean this is where companies like grow to, you know, a unicorn, you know, a billion dollar companies in a year because they just channel massive amounts of money into paid acquisition. And fundamentally if the ad costs me a buck and that customer makes me two bucks, then what should your budget be? Big. I mean it's like in, it's the closest thing we have to infinite money glitch now. We still have to like do the work and fulfill the work. But there's a version of this that, that finds you better clients like they are out there. Let's run through these 10 things to be thinking about. Number one, paid acquisition is not an alternative to organic acquisition. That is paying for ads and placements wherever they be, be they on, on Facebook, on a newsletter for beekeepers, where wherever you're paying to advertise, it's not a replacement for still doing the organic stuff. Many of us we have there's like low hanging fruit. Just by having a few conversations and being visible in a few new places. We always need to do that. But oftentimes we think because we're doing that we shouldn't do paid or because we're doing paid that gives us permission to, to not create content or not be visible anywhere else. Reality is you gotta do both. One will be better than the other. You won't know until you do both. But each of them can, can work together to build a better client list. Which is the goal at the end is just having a roster of clients who will happily pay you top dollar. And then we can go out and find another a client. Like what's the client that looks like the favorite client I have today? Because man, if we had an entire client list of just those people that I love, my life would be so much better. Right? So don't forget the easy stuff. Can I get, I'm just going to rapid Fire you? My definition of the easy stuff. Are you showing up at trade shows for the people that you want to work with? Are you talking to the software companies within that space? Have you ever tried to like, guest write an industry newsletter, somebody that has a newslet offer to support? Have you ever engaged in an online community where these people hang out? If you're looking for beekeepers, go find that beekeeper community. Are we trying to to get onto podcasts that these people listen to? Are we turning the questions that our clients ask us every single weekend to social media posts? If this beekeeper has this question, there's a thousand more that have the same question. Are you doing any co marketing with industry software? Such a big opportunity? Nobody has more money than software companies who literally have quarterly budgets and people whose job it is to spend those budgets, who are hungry for your expertise. If they can use that budget to put you on blast in front of a bunch of people, you can do that and it won't cost you a thing. Have you built relationships with the industry influencers? Have you looked for accounting firms that serve the same group? Have a conversation with them about who are great fit clients for them and who aren't. Maybe they do tax, you do bookkeeping, vice versa, maybe you do the same thing. But there's still going to be clients they don't want that they would happily pass along. Are you doing work with industry associations? So who are the membership groups that folks in that space look up to and how can you support them? Even just having that membership organizations like logo on your homepage so that when a beekeeping client comes and they're like, oh wow, they're a member of bima. They must be super legit. I don't know what that stands for. There are lots of completely free ways to get ourselves out there. We need to be doing that no matter what. So don't think of paid acquisition as a way of like getting you off the hook for that stuff. Second thought thing to nail down. Before doing paid ads, know that there is no version of this that can be fully delegated, fully abdicated. We talked about this with Karen Rayburn recently on the podcast who runs a marketing agency for accounting firms. And wouldn't we all love it if we could just make it somebody else's job and just like never have to think about it. Know that if you try to do that with a firm that's going to do paid ads for you, that's a recipe for burning a whole pile of cash. So unfortunately it is not as simple as just getting out of the way. This looks like building a new skill. Number three. Have something to give to a potential client that is either free or low cost. We did another episode on this recently where the big mistake we often make as firms is we see into the depth of everything these people need. And even though they come to us with problem one, we can see clear to problem 10. And we're like, no, no, no, no, no. I know you think you only have problem one, but let me give you this giant cornucopia of services that are going to solve all the problems you're going to have for the next 10 years. And the person's like, I don't know what most of these words mean. My. My tooth just hurts right now. Can you please just fix my tooth? What is going to go out in a paid ad? It's the thing that fixes the tooth. They have to be feeling a pain very acutely. They have to be super scared of something, super blocked by something, or be very excited about an opportunity that you can unlock for them. We're not going to come up and say, here is our list of services. We're meeting them where they are and unlocking some sort of opportunity for them. This is coming back to the framing of if they give you 10 bucks, how can you give them 20 bucks in return? As much as possible. We got to try to strip back what we do to that. And the more clearly they can see that link, the more it de risks it for them. If all we say is ambiguous things, like, we're going to give you back more time and like, the more ambiguous that framing is, the more risky it is for them. So let's tell real, real stories of where that actually worked, where doing X, Y or Z helped them focus and drive the profitability of their firm. Where we saved them X amount of tax and they could reinvest that in the business and that made them this much money. And let's do that around a single problem that's very specific. And the solution is either free or low cost. All we're trying to achieve with that ad is getting them into the next step or into step one. That's the better framing. You may see 100 steps after that. We're just trying to get them in the door just over the threshold. That's the job of that ad. For everyone that comes over that threshold. You know, 90% of them may bounce before going to that next step. That might be what you really want to happen. But all this just factors into the economics of how much can we afford to spend on these ads and are they actually making us money? We're going to circle back to that. 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 sponsor 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 going to 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 will come and do the work that, that might be the move for you now. Cloud accountants staffing, it's 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 accounts in the Philippines and Latin America and South Africa. But you could do all three and run a 247 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 account staffing also has a platform where you can hop in and self service and see applicants and schedule interviews 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. If this is something that you're exploring, definitely worth chatting with Cloud Accountant staffing. If you haven't done it before, you can have a bunch of ignorant questions like, 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 Account 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? So 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 QBO N0 and has like a step by step process for managing every aspect of the close. Even like some cool 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, you got to work 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 thing number four that you got to nail down before doing this. You have to have something that is your free or low cost offer that actually performs organically as well. That is I can just post it and people will get excited about it. Most people, they don't do any sort of organic posting. They just jump straight to wanting to do paid ads. But the reality is you don't know if that ad is is interesting or not until you've posted it organically. Because all an ad is on a social media platform is a post that gets forced on you. And so if, if your quote unquote ad is something you would go out and just randomly post on LinkedIn and say here are the things that we do and here's the Cost to do it and nobody will engage with it. No amount of paid acquisition and forcing that down people's throat is going to like, effectively convert. Now examples in my domain, because what I know most about is running accounting firms. I don't know much about taxidermists or phlebotomists or beekeepers, although I've been getting educated on beekeeping lately on. On LinkedIn, I was bouncing around the idea of, like, if I did launch an accounting firm, what would be the most fun to watch content wise? Launching a firm from scratch, acquiring someone else's firm, doing it like a firm platform and rolling up other firms. And a lot of people said, go make a beekeeping firm. But a number of people jumped in and were like, there's people that make a lot of money on beekeeping. Like, there is money to be made there. There are people with money who would happily pay for targeted professional services. And beekeeping, I have to imagine is like every single other thing, every other little micro niche where from the outside, we don't know what nuance exists within it until we're there, until we've lived it and we've talked with those people. And it's why the entire world seems vastly more simple on the outside than it is when you get into the weeds. This is the power of getting specific in the people that you serve. And of course we can't see that until we get into it. But like, I mean, isn't that just the human experience? And you know, if we said this about anything else that, that, you know, because we like to say, well, it's all the same. We may not have ever worked with a bookkeeper before, but it's like, oh, it's accounting, it's tax, it's all the same. But if we said this about anything else in life, you know, raising kids or something like that, Raising kids is raising kids. Kids are the same. You say that in any other context and it just sounds extremely ignorant. But I think, I mean, I think this whole podcast, all my content, everything, it's just a really, really roundabout way to get to running a beekeeping firm. Let's lock arms. Because I think that's where we're all headed next. I don't want to say I shouldn't say that because I don't want people getting excited because that almost certainly is not what I would do. But back to the point of getting things to perform organically. What I know about is running accounting firms. And those are problems that you are intimately aware of as well, right? For the Same reason that you would. Most of us would probably sooner hire an accounting firm coach than a generalist coach. We as advisors would be better advisors to a more specific type of person than any old small business. And so the way that I channel what I know about accounting firm stuff into posts that perform organically is I get plugged into what are the biggest pains accounting firms have and I create resources for those things. So huge pain for accounting firms overwhelm when it comes to picking tech. So we put out some really big resources that were pretty high effort into. Here are the right tools to choose. Here's kind of all the practice management systems compared. And like the first time, this was really one of the first lead magnets I ever made. We put like months of work into this giant practice management system report that's now out of date. But I posted that to LinkedIn pretty early days for me. LinkedIn, I had maybe 10,000 followers and that post was like almost 2,000 comments. Like it went nuts and people were all over that report. That report drove a huge number of signups to my newsletter. Because if you sign up for my newsletter, you got a copy of the report so you have something valuable like that that will increase the conversion rate of your newsletter sign up. So if all you do is you give somebody an email field and say sign up to my newsletter, most people will not do that. But if right beneath that you have, hey, sign up to my newsletter and immediately get this valuable thing going to get 10 times as many people on that newsletter. So that one lead magnet that I made, it did great on social media, but it helped me build my email list for years. And that's because that is a pain that we know very, very well. The stress of not knowing if you have the right tech stack and I would argue the only actual solution to that, like while these resources are better than nothing, if you've gone down the path of like building a super cool modern tech stack, you will find you still have a lot of fomo. You still have a lot of looking over your shoulder and being like, should I have done that practice management system or. Or this tax workflow tool or this month end close automation tool. That is an example of you come in, you think you have a problem, I'm going to give you a resource that will solve that problem kind of. It'll at least educate you and get you further. Right? But then what are the next problems you have? Well, now I want to implement this system, but I need an implementer to do this. If I was smart I'd have like a commission arrangement with the folks that do implementation for these platforms. I refer out probably hundreds of implementations a year just from people asking for an intro. But that's an example of the next problem. So I'm not going to run a paid ad around, you know, here's my Rolodex of implementers. I'm going to do it for the problem that people think they have. How do I pick tech then? At that point, they're going to find they have a new problem and you offer them a solution to that next problem, a paid ad. All we're doing is giving them a solution to the first problem. Now, behind the scenes, how my business works, the app recommendations are the solution to that first problem. The only ultimate solution to that tech FOMO that I know is having a peer group is knowing other people that run firms like you and being able to ask them like, hey, I know you use xyz. What does it do and what does it not do? Can we hop on a call and you show me and I'll show you what I'm doing? That is my community. So the first problem is tech selection. You find out you still have a problem of FOMO and not knowing what other people do. The next thing I sell you on then is the paid thing. And so in my business, we can look at, for every person that downloads the free app recommendation database, what percentage of those people ultimately would convert to being paid community members. And, you know, the email sequence that gets them there, bridges them from offer one to offer to that can all be optimized. There's a risk that you attract the wrong people into the community and they bounce really fast. I mean, there's so many like, elements to this that you fine tune. But that's an example of giving them one offer that solves an initial problem so that you then lead them into a next offer that solves the new problem. Every business have, it has a version of this. And if you can find a sequence that works for you that attracts beekeepers or phlebotomists or whoever you're working with, your paid ad solves problem one. And in the course of serving that problem, they build a relationship with you, you build some more trust, and then they're interested in the solution to their next problem. And that next problem may be taking over their bookkeeping and their tax work, whatever it is, maybe something else entirely. But if we lead straight out with here's all my services, like what everybody's website looks like, right? Nobody's ready to make that jump, by and large. And so we start with solving a more specific problem. Other lead magnets we've done in my business, we've got the service library which is like around better systematization of your accounting firm. That is a pain for firms, but it's not as acute as text selection because honestly it's more work. Other lead Magnets, we've done 30 AI prompts to use with your meeting transcripts. That one worked really well. And you'll find as you are testing different things to see what people get excited about, that the medicine they need is very often not the thing that they will engage with. And that may be super irritating. Right? Great example of this. On our YouTube main channel we can get 2 to 3x the performance on videos that, that have to do with AI than we can get on, on any other videos. We'll do a, a really high production value roast video like telling the story of an accounting firm and just the nuance and their, their journey and all that stuff. And they're really cool videos. Like the last one we did, I was super proud of. I'm like, man, if I was still running for, I would love this. And the video did like it did fine. But the next day we can post an AI tool roundup that five times as many people will watch. And that's, I mean, it's just kind of a bummer, right? And there's some people who will see that and they're like, okay, we're an AI channel now and I'm not willing to do that because I think the other stuff we do that has less reach actually has more value, but it is, it is a part of the strategy of the channel as a whole. So we don't have control over what people's problems are. We just got to be realistic about what they are and find the juiciest ones that we can try to solve because that is how you build like an offering that people will actually get excited about and engage with. Okay, number five, for paid ads to work, we have to be able to measure what that new potential customer is worth to us. So the normal framing you hear around this is lifetime value or ltv. Basically it is what is the profit I can get from serving another client like this? And man, the lifetime value of an accounting firm client is pretty massive on average because we don't have a huge amount of churn. Generally if you compare churn in an accounting firm churn being a client, that just leaves you compare churn in an accounting firm to churn In a software company, man, accounting firms are super sticky. But this is a number that we actually have to know and we have to be able to measure what is the average lifetime value of a client. It's tricky to measure because the profitability of all clients is not made equal. So for example, if we have a client come in tomorrow at our minimum, and they're not super profitable, the LTV of that client is very different than like the next a client that comes in the door where we're running like 60% margins on what we do for them. Those are the folks that we really want. Right? But if we don't have any yardstick for this at all, then you can't back into what is then an appropriate amount of money to spend to find that next client. If my a client right now. And, and the fastest way to find who your quote unquote a clients are is who are the people that just love you right now and are paying you top dollar. Doesn't mean you're doing more for them necessarily, because more is not better. Better is better. And better usually means higher effective hourly rates. You enjoy working with them. They are good people. Being good people does not make you good client. But to be good client, you have to be good people. If, if you know, my, my average, a client right now is paying me 2,000 bucks a month. And that's a 60% margin project. And they usually stay with us for four years. Hang on, math is happening. 2,000 times 12 times 60% times what I say, four years. That client. Oh, that's a big number. The lifetime value of that client is $57,600. Now if I spent 57 grand to acquire that customer, I wouldn't actually make any money, right? I would get that $57,000 over the course of four years. So I would be actually out that money for four years. But this kind of puts it in perspective. A clients are very, very valuable. Framed another way, 57,000. That is almost the cost of another human coming and working for you. Not a very high level like marketing human or anything like that. But like, it is worth considering. What would one more a client be worth to me and what am I spending to get them? Because most of us right now are spending absolutely nothing to get them. And there's, I mean, there's loads of ways we could spend money to get them, right, besides paid acquisition. But when you look at the lifetime value of, of accounting clients, like, that's a big number, but it's a number we have to know to be Able to justify the spend. Consideration number six here. We need to be running our ads for clients that are actually profitable client avatars. Right? So we talked about this a bit. The difference between the client that comes in the door at our minimum, yet again. Another reason why we shouldn't put minimums on our websites, because we're not trying to attract more people at the minimum, we're trying to attract more A clients. But if the paid ad works for minimum clients, that's probably not something you want to fill your client list with. As opposed to like what are the top tier clients? Where do my, my A clients right now? Where do they learn? What events do they go to? It's kind of the cool thing with paid acquisition is you can get very, very targeted down to like who do they follow? Literally what events do they go to? Like you can sponsor an event and get the attendee list. Just make sure that they are more of your A clients, not more of your D clients. Really exciting new tech announcement from one of this episode sponsors, Canopy, the practice management system. They've announced Smart Intake and it's a collection of features that vastly improve improve the tax intake system. We talk a lot about the new crop of like tax workflow tools, right? They're doing that really well. But then practice management systems, historically they haven't done that part well. And knowing having to run two different tools for that. This is Canopy's response. Some new things Canopy's doing. They will create predictive lists of the like the goodies you need this year using AI based on past work. They'll build out the checklist and the questionnaire based on pro forma information. This one is sick. They will pre fill those questionnaires based on everything they can see about the client in the file system. That one's pretty cool. When the client uploads goodies, it'll like match those goodies against the request items. And this is kind of related. It'll rename those documents for you automatically when they come in. Actually at the organization level in Canopy you can create file naming conventions for different types of files and anytime it identifies a file of that type, it'll auto rename it according to the convention. Pretty cool. Great news here. If you're thinking about a change to your practice management system, worth chatting with Kanopy. To learn more, check out the link down in the show notes. Funny thing happened recently when I was at a conference with one of this episode sponsors, Makers Hub. So Makers Hub, they're like an AI accounts payable platform. The party Trick is they're using like AI vision models to do extraction at a level that was kind of never before possible with OCR technology. But I was doing something at their booth. Some of the customers came by like it is one of those tools where the customers are kind of raving fans. But a funny thing kept happening. Like people kept throwing out these ridiculous document situations they have where they're like, I got this client, I have X, Y and Z problem. It's a total mess. We spend so much time on it and they just start riffing on it like with the Makers Hub team and they're like, oh yeah, now I can see like this potentially like our product doesn't really do that, but actually if we change this or that this could potentially work. The team is just like, they're just a bunch of like document processing geeks who are also AI nerds. And the product very much is like the marriage of those two things. And so what Maker sub does best right now? Like the biggest, ugliest accounts payable stuff that you got, man, I had some gnarly clients where Makers Hub would have saved us so much time. If you're out doing conferences at all, you'll see Makers Hub a lot add into a connect. I'm going to be there. I think. I'm actually co hosting a thing with Makers Hub. But if you got any ugly bill pay stuff, class tracking projects, inventory, manufacturing, stuff like that, definitely worth giving. Makers have a look to learn more, check out the link down in the show notes number seven. When it comes to actually running the ads, you will best practice here is actually to test a whole bunch of different versions. In fact, Metta has some data that says the highest performing ad folks on their meta ads platforms test 11 times more ads than the lower performers. So plan on like doing a whole bunch of different versions of this. If it's a video ad, if it's just a text ad and image, you will get to the best ones by testing a whole bunch of different versions. And they need to be very, very, very specific. So creativity should always take a backseat to specificity and usefulness. Is this a painful pain that we're actually solving or not? Will the specificity of this ad cause somebody to stop in their tracks to watch it? Good example. We're running a series of workshops in Q3 and Q4. These are expensive events to put on, but they're like amazing local experiences that we're going to do some paid acquisition around. And those ads will start with accounting firms in Citi, accounting firms In Indianapolis, in Oklahoma City, in Philadelphia. The goal, as it should be with all things, is get to the level of specificity that makes somebody stop in their tracks because they're like, oh, that's actually me. And thankfully, in accountingdom, this still works. Because when have you ever seen an ad that said, hey, accounting firms in and then your city, I don't think I have ever seen that in the wild. So today, I think that still works. Today, that probably causes a lot of people to stop the scroll. And so your version of this, depending on if you're trying to serve folks locally or national or nationally, is to get to the level of specificity that causes them to stop where they're not seeing ads from other people like you. And that specifies you got to get there in like three seconds. It's got to be super, super clear who that ad is for, so it makes them stop. We are not like any alternative. Not getting into that specificity then means you have to make a more creative, more entertaining ad than anyone else that's operating at a more general level, which, honestly, gang, we are not capable of. Unless you've been doing this stuff for years and years, then we're going to win on specificity and usefulness. And you can make very specific, very useful ads that are not creative, that are not pretty, but they solve a real problem, thus they will perform. Number eight, consider the time of year that people most acutely feel that pain. A lot of folks are like, yeah, I feel that pain, but I can put it off for now. This rolls into number nine. Actually, pretty much the same thing is, is the ad has to give the person a reason to take action today. It's not enough to say, here's this cool thing. What you have to do is say, here is this cool thing, and why it's very important that it deserves your attention right now. Sometimes, like, depending on the offer and the pain we're trying to solve, that will be built into sort of an annual cadence. Like there's X number of days left in the year before you kind of lock in your tax situation. Other times you'll have to kind of manufacture that. And so that could be, you know, a discount for the next 10 days on whatever this initial offer is. But something has to get them to not only be interested in that thing, but it has to rise to the level of being something that they ought to do now rather than all the other things in the world that are. That are trying to distract them. Last 1, number 10, we got to make sure we are pumping this effort in search of better clients, that needs to always, always be the goal. Most of us do not need more. More will make most of our lives worse. We can only do so much. Accounting firms are blocked on fulfillment, not on customer acquisition. Every type of business has kind of its natural constraints. The businesses that you traditionally see a high volume of paid acquisition from, where you see the ads coming through your feed, those are not businesses that are blocked by fulfillment. So gyms where it's just a matter of, like, getting members in the door. That is not how accounting firms work. Most of us are capacity constrained because we can't find more people to do this work. And it's why you don't see all that many accounting firms doing paid acquisition. But it's very possible that this could be a path to finding better. Particularly if right now you have kind of a messy client base where they do a bunch of different things. And the percentage of it that is made up by your A clients is a very small percentage. Man, we shot a. We shot a video the other day for the YouTube channel around kind of like roasting people's websites in, like, a fun. In a fun way. And as part of asking people for their website, I also said, who's the very best client that you got right now? Where you wish they made up your entire client list? And almost everyone is like, at that turning point where they're like, yeah, we got a few of these, and they're so much more valuable than any of our other clients, but they're still serving everyone else had one person that was like, they do work with, like, cannabis. It was like, cannabis like investment groups or something like that. And he's like, I can charge 500 to $1,000 an hour for doing work with these kind of investment groups, but 95% of my client base is these normal things. And on. On his website, you literally go in and just book a call with him for free. And you see that and, like, you know, this is real. You see that in anybody else's business, and you're like, what are you stupid? Go chase that man. That's the obvious path forward, right? You see that in your own business, you're like, oh, what about. What about letting Tina down? George been with me from the beginning. Meanwhile, you go for your annual physical and your doctor's like, have you been outside since you were here 12 months ago? And you're like, no, it'll go better next year. A lot of us are at that, like, at that point where we can see the better path and you know that if you stopped everything you were doing right now and you just focused on the top 20% or top 10% of your clients right now and didn't do anything for anybody else, you're pretty sure that in a pretty quick amount of time you would have a vastly more profitable, more interesting firm, Right? There's a lot of ways to get there. There are free ways to get there. There's paid ways to get there. But it starts with committing to something more specific, committing to something that is a bigger opportunity. And it. It's scary. Yeah. But if, like, if we're not operating in a place that is kind of scary, then we're probably not growing. Like, when it comes to how we do our renewals, to how am I spending my time? Is this uncomfortable? Am I doing different things? Or am I just plopping down in front of Outlook and letting the day I'm. That one hurt, didn't it? I'm sorry. Easy to. Easy trap to slip into. I do. I do it myself. I needed to shoot podcasts today, and it's way easier for me to sit in front of my email and triage, you know, messages from people being helpful, and they're like, wow, thanks, Jason, you're the best. But I'm like, I got to go shoot podcasts right now. Like, that is the higher leverage opportunity. Same thing with these events we're putting on, these live events. Man, it terrifies me, the notion of people paying and coming to a thing that I made with the expectation of having a great time and that then being my responsibility to deliver on it, that kills me, Kills me, Kills me. But I also know it's crazy transformational. You have a really cool in person experience. Also meeting other local people that can become your friends and having those relationships for the first time changed my life. And there's something about this content that I make that I think draws people out. There's a lot of folks that listen to this stuff and don't have relationships with anybody else that runs firms. And if I can, like get those people to come out to a happy hour, to a half day workshop or something like that and meet other people for the first time, that's so powerful. And so I also, I feel like a. I feel a little bit of a responsibility of, like, I have this audience. What are the most powerful ways that you can help people? And that live connection thing, man, I just. That's been missing and I want to find what the best version of that is to that end. Whole bunch of events coming up, buddy, but. Buddy. I think I was going to say baby, but I don't know. We're on that level. Hopefully the events have been announced by now. I don't even know how many. 15 events, maybe 20. Whoo. Jasonomfirms.com events I might be coming to your city. Please come out and hang. As so many podcast listeners have come out to events this year. And it's weird. We meet, you play it cool. Just. Just know that it's weird for me too. But I'm just, I'm happy to meet folks and hang out and hear your story and like, it's just, it's super, super fun. And then everybody leaves with a few new friends because imagine sitting in a room with a whole bunch of nerds that also listen to this podcast. Like, getting all, getting all those people into a room. It's a vibe, let me tell you. It really is. Gang, thanks for coming and being here today. Hopefully I see you out in the wild soon. I'll catch you in next one.