524 It’s Time We Stop Trying To Educate Our Clients

Ah, fall is here. The crisp, crisp evening air, leaves on the ground, and clients who still don't want to buy what you're selling. If only they knew what we knew, right? They would be jumping at the opportunity to buy all these premium services we're putting in front of them. But why aren't they? Got a great question from a listener to this end. Also, because it's Q and A Friday, a cautionary tale of a bookkeeping and tax partnership potentially gone awry. Best practices if you're trying to build some business with another firm. And a couple questions about how to like, stand out as yourself online in a world where people only know that you exist if you're out there invisible somehow, but none of us rolled out of bed, ready to go. And influence right? Got some thoughts on two questions around that that could make it a little easier for you to show up online next week. Let's get into it. This is a great question. On a podcast episode from Business Rocket, here's a question you touched on how clients often undervalue tax advisory. I would extend that to any type of advisory when firms deliver it as just a couple of bullet points in an email. Do you think the biggest barrier is client education? Or is it more about how firms themselves frame and package the service? Oh, I love this question because how many times have you heard, well, we need to do a better job of educating our clients on on this and that and then they will see the world our way. Right? Right. It is hard not to get on our high horses and be like, buddy, I know you got a lot else going on in your life, but what you need right now, well, just take a look at my menu of services when the reality is, man, I don't have any idea what that entrepreneur's got going on in their life and if that's actually the best use of their time or not. They are, after all, building a business. They still have to make time for those building a business things, and it's ultimately their decision to decide where what I can do for them fits into that and whether that's the right way to spend their money, spend their time or not. And I don't want to make it sound like there isn't any value in educating our clients, but I will say the most valuable teacher it is experience. And this whole topic folds in nicely with overselling, which we talked about a few weeks back. How it's it's very hard when somebody comes in your door and you see the problems they have. And our pattern recognition, human brains are like, oh, yeah, no, I'm. You just like, you're chomping at the bit because you know how to fix all their problems. And you may even just give away all the solutions in the discovery meeting. But it's so hard then when you whip up a proposal to not sell them everything in the kitchen sink. And I mean, the really easy example of this is business owner comes to you, says, I got to find a different solution than my wife doing the bookkeeping or this is going to end in divorce. And that's, that's probably more expensive than your bookkeeping. So they come to you to do the books, but you're like, oh, what's real? Seeing this story a hundred times, I can do the books for them. They're not gonna know how to read them. Their systems are gonna be crap. We're gonna make some tech changes. They're gonna want me on board to meet with them every quarter to kind of do some strategic planning. And so they come to you and you're like, oh yeah, no, this spouse package, we got a plan for that. I'll send that over to you tomorrow. They open their inbox and what do they see? A full back office in a box with CFO support and more bells and whistles than you can check a stick at. And they're like, well, what I wanted was bookkeeping. And what I don't have is the vast amount of cash trying to charge me for this. And so what do they do? They bounce. And we say, we don't, we don't work with those types of clients. It's non negotiable. We got to do all those things for them. Now when that person comes to you, what's the pain that they're feeling? Probably the argument they just had with their spouse or maybe say their last tax pro charged them a whole bunch of money for accounting cleanup. And your plus one isn't the bookkeeper. You thought they were tale as old as time, Right? But the problem they have in that moment, they need a solution for it is bookkeeping. And sometimes it pays to just solve the problems that they're feeling because we know better than they do what their next problem will be. So I sell them bookkeeping. You're going to get three months in and they're going to be like, thanks for sending me these PDFs of the financial statements every single month. But I'll be honest, I don't really know what to do with these. Great. Now they've got a new pain they don't feel like they have like a good sense of sort of the financial going ons of their business and how they can take all that information to inform actual like real life decisions that they have to make. That's an entirely new problem with an entirely different solution. So to bring this back to the question, is the barrier client education or is it how firms themselves frame and package the service? To be clear, a big problem is client education, right? That's why clients are now going to social media to get tax advice. Advice on all sorts of things where you're like, oh my gosh, please do not do that. Client education is, is absolutely a problem. But is my time better spent like fighting against forces in the universe or should I set up camp to solve problems people are already feeling? You can do either one, but one is way easier than the other. Is why we're always looking for rare pains, nuanced pains that we can solve for firm, not for firm. Where am I right now? Not for firms, for business owners. So if taxidermists need this special compliance form completed that requires their books to be done in a certain way, that's a real headache, right? And that's a great pain to solve because it is a rare pain, a pain that is specific to taxidermists. Taxes, that's a pain everybody has. Bookkeeping, that's a pain everybody has. If we think about the problems that usually require more education to get someone bought into the value of paying you to solve that problem, you think like, you know, CFO services because they've never hired a CFO before. Maybe tax strategy work because all they've ever had is somebody to just do their taxes after the fact. Certainly some education there can be valuable. That's where blog posts, you can point people to, little loom videos, generic loom videos that you record walking through how this stuff works, something that's five minutes or less, you make it once you can share it with the next hundred people that you think would benefit or that ask about it. Those are solution unaware people where they don't realize yet how your solution can solve that problem. And on a micro scale that is like with your existing clients, still put that information in front of them. But when we're talking about fighting the bigger battles, the world at large and attracting your next client, what you put on your website ought to be the pain they're already feeling. The website serves the first pain. This is so important. You got to think about what we're putting in front of them at each stage of the client's life cycle. If Somebody isn't going to jump straight into me to buying CFO services because, you know, 95% of businesses, when they come to an accounting firm, they're not even interested in that initially. Then the website ought to be designed around what are the pains that great fit clients share. That's what we're going to use to attract those people. It doesn't mean that that's the only thing that you do. It just means that's where they're going to start. And if you've been around long, you know how big of an advocate I am of doing upfront projects with clients before taking them on for ongoing work. For one, it lets you decide if that person's a maniac or not before you let them on the client list. But for two, if they have a fantastic experience in that initial project, it de risks in their head the idea of, of engaging you for ongoing services, which means they'll pay more. Anytime somebody's coming and thinking about working with you. The price they're willing to pay is factored into how much risk they perceive their being in committing to using you as their service provider. And as much as this may feel like, I don't know, additional work or a step that you would love to skip past, if an upfront project ensures that that new client will pay another 10%, another 20% or 30% than they would have before, buddy, that is, that is going straight to the bottom line. That is a vastly more profitable project from the outset. It's not just a year one thing. It is every single year you work with that client, they will be paying you more as a result. And if you're running a, you know, 20, 30% margin firm, that's upwards of doubling the profit of that project. If you run a small firm and you hear that number and you're like, buddy, I'm running a 60% margin firm. If you're a solo owner, the way we got to think about this is what is the replacement cost of the work that you're providing to the firm? Anybody that's capable of running their own firm, like the. The starting price for someone like that, 200,000, $250,000 a year. I'm going to be realistic about the value of our time. Because when the day comes that you hire somebody to do your job or do part of what you do, we need to make sure the projects we're taking on can actually accommodate what that person's going to cost. Very common. You have a solo firm owner who's taking in work just to pay the bills. And that's. That is where we all start. There's nothing wrong with that. But then they end up in a spot where they say we can't hire anybody yet we can't afford to hire people is because as long as we aren't factoring in our own worth to the business, then we're like we're kind of cheating ourselves taking on work that only you can do because you don't have to pay yourself market rates. Right? You pay yourself whatever the business makes. And so much of running a successful professional services firm is it about is about eking a little bit more out of every proposal. And things like that upfront project where the client goes from sort of skeptical to working with you. In fact, maybe they wouldn't have even considered working with you on an ongoing basis. They just wanted to do this project to maybe see what that was like. To take them from that skeptical place to a place where they now can't imagine working with anybody else. That is a client that is vastly more willing to pay for what you have to offer and by extension becomes a much more profitable client. And so when we talk about the pains clients are already feeling, there's an opportunity then to set up that standalone offer around that pain. Maybe you've got, maybe you've got potential clients who have a lack of trust in their previous tax advisor and you have a service that is just a review of their past tax returns. They don't even have to dump their previous provider to get you to do this service for them to get, to get more nuanced. Maybe you've got an industry specific lead that has maybe a specific to them compliance headache and they don't know if they're doing it right or not. They just want a second set of eyes. We did a feature on a firm recently where they work with this specific grocery store chain basically and anytime somebody comes into ownership of one of these stores, they have to have this like minimum financial education. And this one firm is providing that. And they're getting 80% of the people coming through this channel. That person may need all sorts of stuff, but in the beginning they need the 101 and it's the one on one that gets them into the door is literally a requirement of the lessors to have this certification. That is a very rare pain. Right. They need that to be able to own the store. And this accounting firm can provide that. The pains people are already feeling are infinitely easier to sell and to attract folks via than us. Like getting on the high horse and being like, everybody needs this and I'm going to convince you of it. Like, for sure. Be opinionated and we can even push this stuff. Like, once those folks are on the client list, just know it is. It is vastly easier to build your business selling things that are a solution to pains that people are already feeling than it is to try to convince them of something. But most of us, we're doing the latter. We are convinced of the value of X, Y and Z and we're trying to, trying to get everybody else to believe in it the same way that we believe in it. And having that conviction is fine. It's actually good. What we're missing is the connection from the pain they feel today to the solution we think is so powerful because it may be like five orders of separation away. Like the bookkeeping example. The guy that needs bookkeeping then doesn't know how to understand his books, then doesn't know how to like put that into sort of actionable steps for his business. Oftentimes the thing that we are, we profoundly believe in, it's because we've seen that progression play out so many times over and over and over again. But if our messaging leads with the solution that is five steps down the line, then you never attract the people who are still at step one. It's a big reason why, like in my content, like, I always have to call out like talking three tier proposals. The vast majority of people that listen to this podcast are still hourly Bill. And three tier proposals, like, that's a couple steps away from that. Right? So I'm always trying to remember, like, how do I contextualize this for folks who are sort of anywhere in the journey? There's not, I mean, by and large, there's not anything wrong with people that are earlier in the journey. Those are not bad people. But our messaging and what we do needs to be dialed into like a specific type of person at a specific spot in their journey. And the world is big enough to support a firm where we're speaking to those very specific things. And then when we want to get on the soapbox, we, what we're actually doing is like crafting the path to that soapbox. We're saying, I'm going to do one for you and then you're going to need me to do two. After that you'll need me to do three, and then you'll really see the value of four. But not until then. The more we can tie the problems that we solve back to like, explicit roi, the most pure version of this being, you can give me 10 bucks and I'll give you 20 bucks back. Like, that's ultimately what people will spend on. Otherwise. We are selling commoditized stuff. Stuff that's being done just because it has to be done. I have to file a tax return. I have to have bookkeeping so I can do taxes at the end of the year. How do we escape that? By selling solutions to people for problems that are costing them money and that might be consuming their time, might be blocking their business. There might be like a profit lever there that is being held up by this compliance headache. Or the fact that they can't hire accountants internally to do X, Y or Z. Those are much easier things to sell people than the more big brain. Things that are usually like several steps down the line. Like, they're often things that we think are impressive. But for the clients coming in our doors, the most basic things for us, the client will think are impressive. So we're usually thinking just like with several levels ahead where they are. As a great question, you disagree with me on this stuff or if you found a good way to do client education within your client base that like converts really well, drop that stuff down in the comments because it is still a thing. The guy that comes and gets bookkeeping for the first time and he's like, I don't know what to do with these financials. The solution there now is, is at that point is client education is saying, yeah, like the solution for what you're feeling is this. But that guy wasn't googling for that because he didn't know what the solution was yet. So step one is solving that pain could air air a grievance with you. Right now we are in peak tech selection season and your most important tool in your firm, it is your practice management system. But when you go to these providers and you ask them what firms are you great for? You know what, pretty much all of them say accounting firms, everyone. Our tool is the best for everyone. Buddy, that just ain't true. And one platform that is being built for a very specific type of firm, it is client Hub. They know who they're great for. And it is CAS and outsource bookkeeping practices like accounting department in a box. Is that what you're doing for your clients? If so, buddy, look at Client Hub. They're building for that very specific type of firm. Good example. They have like a, arguably a deeper integration into the ledger than maybe any other practice management system because they give you like an entire way to manage the month End close inside of Client Hub. It's a sort of functionality that with most of our other practice management platforms, you would have to pull in a separate month end close automation tool to get that functionality. But it's all happening inside of Client Hub because they know exactly where what the firms who are a great fit for them need. Buddy. It is no different than what we talk about in accounting firms where it's way easier to serve a specific type of client at a very high level. That's what Client Hub's doing, man. They're building a platform for a very specific type of accounting firm. And if that is you, they really ought to be on your short list of practice management systems that you're considering rolling into 2026. So to learn more about Client Hub and actually some really cool new AI workflow stuff they've got going as well, well, check out the link down in the show Notes. Can I let you in on a secret about offshore hiring? This was, this was actually my experience and now that I've talked to more folks that have done it, a lot of people go through this progression. So in my account community, realize about 40% of those firms, it's almost 600 firms, almost 40% of them are doing offshore hiring. And that is, that is way higher than that was like three years ago. World's just gotten smaller. I think Covid had a bit of play in that. Distributed work is kind of the norm. Right? So it doesn't matter where your team is. American accounting, it's not that much different than elsewhere. Even US Tax, you can find experts around the world for that sort of stuff. But the team behind this video sponsor, Team up, they noticed the same thing that I did, and that's that most firms go through a progression where they first hire a middle person to employ the staff and all that because they trust that that service a little more. And that service handles a lot of the logistics with the employee. But then you end up paying as much to that service as you do to the employee themselves. This is where most firms start with staffing. But once you get past like hire four or five, what I commonly see is they then just start hiring people direct. They're like, I actually just want to employ this person directly because half of what I pay I don't want to go to this other group. This is what Team up was born on. What Teamup does differently is they will help you directly hire accountants in the Philippines. No middle people. All you actually pay to team up is a recruiting fee. And that's it. So whether you're just getting started or whether you're maybe further along and you got now talented people that are trapped inside of these other organizations, by the way, virtually impossible to get those people out of those contracts. Team Up's a great way to find folks to come work for you directly. Learn more about TeamUp. Check out the link down in the show. Notes a story here from someone that is considering a partnership with a tax firm. Here's the context. They own a bookkeeping business and have a potential opportunity to partner with a CFO c CPA slash CFO firm in their area. The firm owner approached the bookkeeper about handling all the bookkeeping for the firm's clients and becoming a part owner in this CPA slash CFO firm. They said they're not ready to, like, throw in the towel on their own bookkeeping practice. In fact, they've only been doing this a year and they've already been offered this. So they wanted some suggestions on how to navigate a deal like that and whether it would be worth considering taking ownership in another firm. If you're going to go in and do all of their books, this is a great problem to have. It means you're doing something right. This person who runs their own firm has several contractors working for them. Now as a bookkeeping practice, there's already another firm who is like, we just want to roll you up. We'll even give you some equity and just come and work for us. And my first reaction to that is, if you're getting these inquiries after only a year, you're doing something right. And this, to then go and do this just for one firm seems incredibly limiting, but very hard to walk by opportunities like this. Right? It's, it is a combination of, like, flattery and you look at this other firm and it's, it's impressive, it's maybe bigger than yours. And you're like, ooh, I could be an owner in this bigger, more impressive ship. And what makes this really hard to resist is if you could jump back in the time machine 18 months and if you could have seen that you would have this opportunity available to yourself, you would have been like, buddy, let's not get too big for our britches here. This is a great opportunity. And because, and this is just like human nature, we, we like, we. We kind of live in the past. Like our identity is always lagging behind what we're capable of. And it's why oftentimes a bunch of people have to tell you you're capable of something before you believe it in yourself, or it takes somebody else coming and putting this big offer in front of you, and you're like, holy smokes, am I even worth that? It takes things like that to convince you oftentimes of. Of what you're worth and what you're capable of doing right now. But at the end of the day, as much as it feels like the opposite, sometimes you got to trust the fact that if somebody's putting an offer in front of you right now, there will be 10 times as many people doing the same in the near future, and there'll be vastly better offers. And I mean, if we look at this like you've been running a bookkeeping firm for one year, you're growing, They've seen enough to be like, this is great. It can be hard to walk away from a deal like this, but at the same time, you have to trust that if you really wanted to do this down the road, there will be other opportunities as well. And this, like, the fact that this is so hard to resist and hard to say no to, is why going on the offensive is. Is the right thing to do here. Like, you really want to be on the other side of this, where you're making offers to people. We see this in our staff. And, you know, good managers raise their staff and, like, show them how good they are, because oftentimes you'll have people that don't realize how capable they are, and bad managers will kind of hide that from them and try to diminish their value when the business is actually extremely reliant upon them. And the same thing happens at an organizational level. Like, if you can do the outbound and go on the offensive and be like, holy smokes, like, this is a really good operator. How do I. Even though they're doing their own thing, how could I involve them in my business? Oftentimes because that operator has never been exposed to an opportunity like that. It feels too good to say no to. But especially in this case, we got a bookkeeping firm that's only a year old. Man, you are so early in your journey still to complicate your life with a partner going into a bigger ship rather than building your own thing. I think of it in terms of, like, what is the trajectory that I'm on? And sometimes it's hard to see in the moment. But I've shared the story before of, like, in my team and my firm, we had very, very fast growing people, like, where in the period of years we would take them from someone with virtually no experience to somebody that like had an incredibly valuable skill set and there were a lot of other opportunities, other things that they could go do. By the end of, when I was running my firm, my people were being actively poached by other accounting firms. And we had one young guy who left way too early and he came in in a place where he had very little job prospects. And in a matter of just a few years, like had learned such an incredibly valuable skill set that he then went to basically go and do it for like a little family office. And like, not all family office setups are bad. This was not an impressive one. The guy is like mid to late twenties at this point and had just gone through three years of unbelievable growth to now go sit and run the books for a few companies for some dude guy hadn't even hit 30 yet. And I was so annoyed, so, so, so annoyed. We had a, we had a meeting with the team, just kind of walk through like what happened and that this individual was leaving and we just had a really frank conversation. Basically we're doing something really, really cool here and everybody's growing really fast and everyone can see that in each other. And you are all going to get job opportunities every single week. But the reason you're growing is that you're here and someday you will leave. And that's. That is like the thing that I will be most proud of is that we had a ton of super capable people that went on to go do amazing things elsewhere. Because every great company, every great team spins out amazing people that then go on to do amazing things themselves. But you got to consider when is the right time to make that jump. When am I done growing to where I'm going to go get off the bus and now go do something else. Maybe that something else will continue me growing on the same trajectory. Oftentimes it won't. If I'm going into private, it almost certainly will not. There's an element of like cashing in on where you are in your journey today for something a little bit easier that won't force you to keep growing at the same rate. Because like working at my firm, it was a lot, we asked a lot of people, we hired very good people. You were surrounded by very capable people. And so that like, that kept you cranking, like expecting a lot of yourself. This was a conversation that we had quite a bit with our team just to like be very self aware of that. Just the fact that any of these people on our team, they could go take a job with those clients, get paid 150 years a controller. And for most of these people, three years ago, that would have been absolutely unthinkable. You're taking them from basically retail to an entirely different skill set that is very valuable. But when's the right time to get off the bus? Whether you are a staff person working in a cool, exciting situation, a staff person working in a boring situation where you're like, oh, I don't feel like my stocks are really going up right now. Like that trajectory is something you always have to be thinking about. But then when you go into business for yourself, when you're an entrepreneur, these things come into play, I think even more because you can see the impact that your business is having on you. Whether it's growing you into the person that you want to be, whether it's growing the business into a place that will upskill a bunch of other people in a way that you're proud of. And there will come a day if you're doing something cool where somebody comes along and they're like, I like what you're doing. I'm going to make you an offer. And if you, you rewind back to the kid that was working at Best Buy when he was 16 years old and if he could see that offer that that person just made you, he would punch you right in the tum tum. If you had a second just to even pause and consider, should I do this? Like, there's so many people from your past and all that, that'll be like, wow, awful big, big for your britches to not jump on that offer, that alternative journey. And it will only be you that can say, nah, I'm actually worth more than that. The trajectory that is like the one of my own design, the path that I'm creating right now, I could see something better. This isn't the right time to get off the bus. And for this person in this situation, one year into running a bookkeeping firm, too early, man. There's going to be other opportunities. From a practical standpoint, a partnership with an accounting firm like that, for one, you don't start it by jumping into equity. And I think they've worked together already. But even if you were going to consider something like that, do the non equity version. Like you can do a partnership where clients sign a disclosure agreement so you can share information between firms. You can deliver it as something that feels like one seamless experience. And if you can't do that without being co owners, then you're definitely not going to be able to do it as co owners. So from a practical standpoint, anytime you're looking at a deal like this, find a reversible way into it. If it doesn't work out the way you think, then you got to give yourself a way out. It's a group. I mean, the most important way to de risk the whole thing is don't do it in a way that can't be unwound. And so certainly don't start with equity. But don't sell yourself short. Recognize you're on your own growth path and don't let anybody else, I don't know, undermine that to their own end. Right? Couple asked questions around Showing up online and making content. This is just such a good one that I think so many people feel in some way or another this comment. A lot of us want to be useful, want to be helpful to folks online, but know that in order to put it out online, we have to make it super basic and worry that people already know that stuff or they can see all the other places that that stuff's already being talked about elsewhere online. And this, this is a hundred percent true. Like, it's the feeling of looking online and being like, what do I have to contribute to this conversation? There's already so many things being talked about and so many people that I think are more impressive than me talking about this same issue. How do I even join the conversation? And this is the trap of entering the conversation in too generalized of a way because the world has enough social media posts and YouTube videos about how to read a balance sheet. Who's going to be the first one to make it about how to read a balance sheet for birdhouse builders? Hmm. That's probably, that's probably a thing I don't. People made fun of me when I said beekeeping niches. Now, just from Internet comments, I'm convinced you could run an extremely profitable accounting firm around beekeepers. But if you're, if you have this feeling of like, I'm not adding anything to the conversation here, then it means you aren't thinking specific enough yet. And this isn't some like, burn all the ships, make this big final decision. I'm never going to work with a non a birdhouse client again. This is just how do I make something useful that somebody will actually see? The more general you go, the higher the bar is. Right now I make content for pretty much all but the top 100 accounting firms covering pretty much everything except for audit and a test work. That's a pretty general audience. It's, it's, in some ways it's very general in other ways, it's not general at all, but somebody that wants to help. Accounting firms say they want to get into coaching firms. If they take my approach, it's not going to work like I've got. I mean, people ask me, what camera do you use, what editing software do you use? I used like seven or eight really, really talented humans. Like we have an entire media team now. We have all this infrastructure shoot stuff on, on cinema cameras. All of these things that I didn't have when I was starting out. And so to come in and try to do it the way that I do it, that's going to be really, really hard because you don't come out day one being any good at that stuff until you put in a bunch of repetitions. And so even my business, which is, it's actually smaller than micro niche because you know, a micro niche YouTube channel is one with a hundred thousand subscribers. We are like a third of that. So my business is micro micro niche. If you're afraid of going micro niche, consider isn't this content much more useful because it's very targeted for accounting firms. A lot of folks listening to this that are like, well, yeah, but are the same people who will say, I'm not going to make something just for beekeepers. It's all the same. It's all accounting at the end of the day. It's all tax at the end of the day. Yet here we are talking about like inside baseball, accounting firm stuff, right? So if you feel like you don't have anything to add to the conversation, you're probably speaking to too big of a room. Still take that specific thing that you're into, that one path that you're thinking about going down and start the conversation there. For me, that was no code automation for accounting firms. It was like four or five years ago, no code was having a moment. It was like everybody can be a developer, you can make these little workflows without code. And it still is a thing that I'm super into and a thing that's very cool and very useful. But that was where I started and it's not until now that we're really zoomed out to the like the breadth of firms that we support and create content for now. So what is that Venn diagram of the client that's a great fit for your firm and the thing that you're interested in and go out and have those conversations. Honestly, if you can find that. It takes so much of the work out of this stuff. Like I hate sales, I hate going to Events is a symptom of I haven't found people I enjoy working with yet because quote unquote sales, quote unquote going to events, networking, it's just hanging out with people and being useful. And when I had to go do general versions of this, like at my local firm when we were serving any type of people out there, I would go to quote networking events and would just want to peel my skin off because the people there were just like, this was so scummy. Why are there so many realtors in this town? This is not fun. But then when I found the people I enjoyed hanging out with and talking with, which as it turns out is accounting firm folk, now when I go to events, it's super fun. Like I just enjoy geeking with these people. And that is sales. That is networking, going out and hanging out. That specificity makes it so much easier. 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 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. Annoying having to run two different tools for it 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 item. And this is kind of related. It'll rename those documents for you automatically when they come in. Actually at the organization level in Canape, 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 Kanape 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's sponsors, makershub. 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 microsub team and they're like, oh yeah, no, I can see like you can do 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. We're Maker Hub would have saved us so much time. If you're out doing conferences at all, you'll see Makers Hub a lot. Add Intuit, Connect. I'm going to be there. I think I'm actually co hosting a thing with Maker's Hub. But if you got any ugly bill pay stuff, class tracking projects, inventory, manufacturing, stuff like that, definitely worth giving Makers Hub a look. To learn more, check out the link down in the show notes. All right, last one here. If you needed some inspiration. Got a note from someone building their own firm, struggling with how to attract clients. And I just, I posed the question like, how do people find you? How do people know you exist? Gave me an explanation that included I'm not as funny and engaging as you on video. Do I need, what would you tell this person? You probably already know what I'm going to say to this man. I'm like, I'm like four or five years into doing video myself. Personally, I was not as funny and engaging as me on video either when I was first starting out. And now you, you have all this apparatus in the team that's literally just employed to make me look good and all these things going on and people come up and they say, wow, you're a natural. And then it's like, man, I'm sure not. It's like we, it's like we're all still Nobby Nade 16 year olds at a track meet and you're like, I think I'm going to do high jump. You do high jump and you're like, these people are all a lot better than me. And high jump. I think I'm going to do the hundred meter dash. Turns out I'm pretty slow. Maybe I'll be a distance runner. No, that didn't work either. And you look around and you're like, dang, these people are all way better than me at this stuff. And you think because Usain Bolt was born with unbelievable gifts, that for the rest of your life you are subject to the hand that you were dealt. When I would argue those things, those things get you maybe through your mid-20s and then everything after that is like, it is adulting, which is a product of are you taking care of yourself? Are you charting an intentional path for yourself where you're like building useful skills and are you willing to do the same things over and over again to get good at them? Because that's like, that's the secret to being prolific at something. But we had this like, this like built in thing where it's like people are just going to be naturals at X, Y or Z. And that's true to a degree, but you also have like a 40 year working career to choose what you want to get good at. And the driver of that more than anything else is going to be where have you put in the repetitions that nobody else has? You know, I think it's naval. That says like, you got to find the thing for you that feels like work to everybody else but doesn't feel like work to you. And for me, that was video. I really enjoyed making silly videos. And before that, before long it became kind of more of a business. But in that phase where it was a new thing that I found that I was really enjoying, I was putting in repetitions at a level that nobody else was. So I was, I was just doing more volume than anyone else and got good as a byproduct of that. Now I have my own things and my own, my own sort of inclinations like, you know, comedy and sort of rah rah motivational stuff and my own flavor of, of doing video. But you don't discover what that is for you, which is going to be completely different until you go through and, and do a bunch of that stuff. So right now, like what is that thing that would be an awesome force multiplier for you that you would enjoy, that you can do and it doesn't feel like work that in three to five years you could be really good at. And that could be a really useful life skill. Like if we give in to the notion that, like, we don't have time for this and we're too busy or too important or too far down the road to not start doing that new thing badly, which is where everything starts. Then. Then what are we going to do? Like, what else will we do? The alternative is literally just sitting back and letting the universe come at you and see what happens. And while there's a degree of that that is healthy, like putting yourself out there and trusting that that things will happen and increasing your surface area for luck, I gotta balance that with what do I love? Like, what do I enjoy? And am I investing in those things? And even if I'm really bad at that thing now, if it's something I'm passionate about in a way that most people aren't, that thing almost inevitably becomes an advantage to me. Even if it's not a very explicit business skill, even if it's Megan Birdhouses, if I'm super into burb stuff, then maybe that's a signal that I need to go out, find the people having those conversations. And like, the cool thing about accounting is everybody needs accountants. So somebody within Burdenham, it's probably got a very specific pain that my accounting firm can serve, and those folks, because I'm into that stuff, I'm going to enjoy having those conversations. And maybe when you get there, you realize I need this skill set that I don't have yet. And you sit down in front of a camera because you decide, oh, it's actually, I gotta. I gotta make a video for this thing. And you're like, oh, this is a lot harder than I thought it would be. And I hate my voice a lot more than I thought I would. The good news is when you find that space that's specific enough and you put the useful thing out there, nobody will care. Five years ago, nobody was making YouTube videos for accounting firms. So when I made really, really bad ones, nobody cared. Also, nobody watched. But the ones who did were like, hey, this is really useful. Thank you. They didn't come in with the expectation of this, like, big, super polished production. In fact, now it's kind of off putting. Like, people almost suspect I'm like an Internet grifter. When they come in and see a very polished video, in many ways, they actually take it less seriously because they compare it to other polished things that they've seen. And they're like, well, that's not how accounting firms do things. So, like, there's an authentic version here that doesn't have to be very good, but because it's so specific for like the right person at the right time. They're just going to be so thankful. And that trumps everything. Like, you can take all these fancy cameras away and all that stuff. People will still tune into my content as long as it is useful. They don't watch it because it looks polished or because it's funny. Like, step one is, is this useful for me? That's how it became a business. And then all the other stuff got layered in and honestly can kind of be a distraction sometimes. But our single greatest advantage as adults is what are. What is the thing that I can do that I don't burn out on, that other people just aren't into, like your interests? What makes you unique? That's your greatest competitive advantage. Find a way to lean into it and marry that with a group of people who can be served by that thing. That's your competitive advantage. I feel really fortunate. That's what I feel like I've found. I love talking with accounting firm people. I like doing silly video stuff. Thankfully, there's a subset of accounting firm folks that like that stuff too. And those are the types of folks that listen to the podcast now and turn out to live events and all that. Oh, by the way, live events. What a roller coaster. I, I sure hope they are out by now. I teased them far too early. But as it would turn out, the logistics of, of announcing 20 live events, it's. It's a lot. It's a lot. Please help. Please come. I hope they've been announced at this point. Jason on firms.com events was in Salt Lake City last week, like 30 firms out just hanging out. And almost none of them knew any other firms in town and they're like making new friends. And like just the vibes of this stuff is so good when you can meet other like very local to you firms. It's super, super fun. But this has been a Q and A Friday. Got any questions? Pop that stuff down in the comments, send me a text or a voicemail. 516-98-04-4968 that's me. And thanks for being here. I'll catch you in the next one.