547 Is Offshoring RUINING Small Accounting Firms?

Hey, I hope everyone had a nice, peaceful Zen Thanksgiving week last week. Let's start this week off with some positivity. Nope, just kidding. We're talking about offshoring. Boo. This guy stinks. Offshoring, I would say, is as big of a thing as AI right now. Hot take? I don't think so. Coming out of COVID I think the biggest long term impact will be people first learned they could work with their colleagues across town and then very quickly realized, oh, I kind of do that with like anybody in the world. And so the globalization of work is happening crazy fast right now. And regardless of how you feel about it, there are good ways to go about implementing this in really bad ways. And are there aspects of it that are problematic? You better betcha. In fact, talking about a few here that are like real dystopian, but also how to mitigate for like the fundamental question of if all the technical work gets offshored, how will any of the onshore people ever learn how to do this work? Aren't these firms just shooting themselves in the foot? Let's start there. Okay, let's talk about it today on the Jason on Firms podcast.

If you're new here, welcome in. We talk about running small accounting firms. So I say small. I mean like probably 10 million and under in revenue. And listen, normally people aren't this angry. Offshoring, it's a big deal. Let's talk about it now. Here's the, here's the bigger question that kind of got me on this path. I'll give you the whole thing here. The question, where do you think our industry will be in five or 10 years with all this offshoring? It's happening a lot, but most firms seem to be offshoring the technical work and nothing client facing. But if we don't have. But if we don't have onshore staff being skilled or trained up with client facing skills and responsibilities, what happens when firms lose their current client facing team members and the step behind them is all in the Philippines? Do you think firms are thinking through the long term transitions in how they're building offshore teams? Great question. This is the big counter argument I hear in like with bigger firms, by the way, bigger firms cutting people in big numbers because they're moving entire departments to offshore. And this is like fundamentally, this is why this is such a divisive thing, is there's a lot of folks whose jobs have been very impacted by the offshoring trend. And to be clear, man, that sucks. There's no way to candy coat that, but the hat that I will wear on this podcast is one of an entrepreneur. So I ran a 40 person practice and I can speak to my experience and what we did and, and how we were mitigating for some of the issues in this question. But this is just inherently divisive because people are and will continue to be displaced by offshore. There's even some connections here to AI, but we're going to circle that back to that in a little bit like AI offshoring. To me right now it simply feels like this inevit and are there a lot of problems with it? For sure, but it solves two really painful problems and is something that will just happen. So I think the conversation needs to be more to the end of like how do we protect ourselves against the downsides and what are the right way to do it and what are the right ways to do it? For context, in my firm we were hiring accountants in the Philippines when we couldn't get onshore folks to do the work that we needed. There's a lot of accounting firms, small accounting firms, feeling this pain. At the same time, you will see accountants that are out there trying to get a job and they can't find a job. And can those two things coexist in the same reality? Unfortunately, they can. Accounting firms are looking for accountants and there are accountants looking for accounting firms. But the firms who have been struggling to make the right hire for years and are perpetually blocked by being able to hire fast enough when they see a bunch of growth potential out there hiring offshore, very enticing. I mean, it is. I mean, in some ways it is like private equity, right? Got a whole ton of capital that has to go somewhere. And then you look at the accounting profession, you got a bunch of old farts, partners that need somewhere to go, they need someone to buy them out and PE will give them a better number than the traditional path. So those partners are solving a problem for private equity where the capital has to go somewhere and the partner has to take money from somebody to get bought out. They are each solving each other's problems and in the end it still sucks. The fact that those two things solve each other's problems does not mean that that's going to be a better accounting firm. Really doesn't. But because there's so much capital and because there's so many old farts that want to retire, that stuff is just going to keep happening. And so the question is, can we make a good version of this? We got plenty of examples of versions of it. That suck. Will somebody find a good version of this? This is the way I usually talk about PE is like right now we are seeing many, many examples of how to not effectively roll up accounting firms. But it doesn't mean some days somebody won't do it right. In fact, PE's vision for how to run an accounting firm is more similar to my own vision for how to run an accounting firm than the traditional partner model. Now when it comes to offshore, you have firms that are hungry to be able to hire people at a faster rate. And you have offshore folks happy to take the paycheck. Man. In most cases they're getting paid much better than local wages, like the people I employed. Like it was a transformational thing for them to be able to come to work for us. But can that go too far? If your next 20 hires are offshore folks, are you kneecap in your future? The answer is I would say yes, if that's all you did. For sure. Like that's kind of obvious, right? If I run a 20 person firm today and they're all onshore and my next 20 hires are offshore, I'm probably creating a little mini pipeline problem inside of my practice where I'm not upskilling people. You know, if I've got an intern on the team right now and we're like, no, no, no, no, no. Only the offshore folks do the technical work. You must now be client facing 21 year old snot nosed junior in college. Let me connect you with this 56 year old client who needs some advice. Well, that's not going to work obviously, right? So yes, there's a version of this where you go too hard on offshore. What we did in my firm is we were building those things in parallel. We were building an onshore team, we were building an offshore team. And as soon as you pull on an offshore team, assuming they're non client facing, it does fundamentally change the role of your onshore folks. They need to be more client oriented. Now I would argue we had many examples where our onshore team members were just like fundamentally unwilling to do certain things that offshore team members were willing to do. And the best example we had of this was like a pretty big volume of bill pay for our clients. And it wasn't because we could make any money on bill pay. It was because we can make money on the cash advisory work that bill pay unlocked for most of these clients. Unless we had our hands on the invoices and a better understanding of how stuff got paid throughout the month, we couldn't accurately Project, like short to midterm cash. And we had a bunch of clients that like really ran their cash tight. And so this cash advisory service, ironically, people would pay really, really well for it if they felt like they had a really clear understanding of, you know, their sort of week over week short term cash outlay. And so as a result, we kind of had to take on the bill pay work. But in my six years of doing that, I don't think I ever had an onshore person I could put on bill pay for more than four months. They would eventually be like, I'm dying. If I have to do this another day, I will go back to the mall kiosk. I don't care what I'll do, I just won't do this. This is what forced my hand. First, hiring offshore. And honestly, this is kind of a misplaced way to approach it because hiring offshore, you genuinely hire like any expertise level, big four regional. Everybody has offices in India and the Philippines, increasingly in Latin America. And so folks fall out of those firms with loads of expertise just like they do stateside. But I went into it with the biases that most Western people have or their association with offshore workers is in very low skill roles. Like you are calling support, talking to the Indian guy. And so you're like, okay, so this is, this is something for low skill work. It really isn't. But I can tell you I went into it with that bias. And so I started because I needed somebody to do the bill pay and maybe I got lucky. But man, I went 4 for 4 with our offshore hires. And never in all my years would I go four for four on onshore hiring. Just not a chance. And we had a pretty like, robust hiring process. We would do trial days like it was a pretty high effort hiring process. And we would still have people would show up to work buzzed on their first day. Your, your first day. You couldn't have made it through the first day. Not talking about the haircut, I'm saying by 10 in the morning they had had an adult beverage. And that's just not the best first impression. And so I don't, I hate to generalize, but there's a version of this that is like, oh, you have all these onshore snowflakes that are unwilling to do this certain types of work. So we had to hire offshore folks to, to do some of that. Some of that was true in our case. But I can tell you the other bigger thing for our team is we were so hiring blocked that we had folks kind of stuck in These roles where they were growing super fast, and we're like, hey, 12 months from now, we really want you to do an X, Y and Z. And they're like, I can't see the path to that until I've got somebody that I can hand off the things I'm doing today to. So we couldn't hire fast enough to like keep our team members growing. And so when I told them, like, here's the deal, we're going to start hiring offshore, it was exactly what you'd expect. Folks were spooked. They're like, okay, that's kind of weird. And I would, I would explain to them why I thought this was the move. And very, very quickly, the onshore team got so on board with this. One, because the folks we hired were just really, really good. Like they were excited in the same way that bringing on a really good colleague is exciting. But two, because it was like their release valve, they had an abundance of folks they could push work to and delegate to, and it finally free them to get into the more valuable stuff, which was the bigger career for them. Their career opportunity was not doing bill pay until the end of time. For, for most of my accountants, it was not even like the tedium of the month end close. It was more like rising into relationship management and the advising calls and all that. And that's, that is what they wanted to do. And so for us, that jigsaw puzzle came together very well. Now, had we just gone all in and only had offshore folks doing the work kind of from end to end, then, yeah, you kind of setting yourself up for a disaster if none of the folks in the pipeline know how to do the work. That wasn't really what we were doing in that production process. We had a mix of both onshore and offshore folks. But it definitely did change what we looked for in our, in our onshore folks. These needed to be people that could like carry a conversation and had some soft skills. Now I would argue part of this is like the evolution of what people are willing and excited to do. Like, is there a day when it becomes very hard to hire an onshore person to like enter 1040s into your 25 year old tax software? Almost certainly. We were honestly probably already there. And that is ultimately how I got to the point of honestly not having a problem with offshore staffing. In fact, on this episode, very good chance you'll hear ad reads for offshore staffing groups. It became a very important part of our firm strategy. Now, at least today, there's two offshore staffing groups we work with, team up. Team up's just a recruiting group. They will find you accountants to work with directly. All you do is you pay a one time upfront fee and then cloud accountant staffing this guy that used to run an accounting firm. They will do the recruiting, but they'll also do like ongoing support, like you need help with it and all that stuff. More like help me to manage this team on an ongoing basis. So they do the recruiting, but there's also an ongoing fee. But in either situation you just have people that come and work exclusively for you, which is the only offshoring model I recommend. You can go to offshoring groups and buy tax returns and buy month end closes. And my experience what that almost always looks like is you get dazzled in the sales process because they put their best people on the work and then you buy into a contract, you commit to X number of these things and then the quality just goes off a cliff. That, that is my experience with pretty much all of these. And I just love the simplicity of I already have an onshore team. It's not that big of a deal to then have an offshore team, especially if we're a distributed team. It's really not that big of a deal where they are. And so my version of this that I much prefer is just I hire people to come to work for me, we train them, we take care of them, we give them bonuses. They've got their own incentive structure. Just it is just an extension of the team. Now in the US we've got disclosure rules around anybody that has access to tax information. These are 7216 rules. Don't try to figure out how to navigate this stuff yourselves. Like staffing groups, they've done this with hundreds and thousands of firms. Like take their advice and use their templates and all that. But in short, if you're doing business tax work, that disclosure generally can go in in the text of your engagement letter. If you're doing 1040 work, that disclosure has to be a separate document that the client signs for. I think it's any term. So usually when you are onboarding them, there will be a document that they sign and you can say that's for, you know, 10 years, 20 years, whatever it is. But again, rely on the staffing groups to hold your hand through this. The two staffing groups that we work with, I think that's an important partnership for us because you get inbound from so many staffing groups, different flavors of this stuff and even random individuals. The two groups that we work with. I know 50 plus firms for each that are like really raving fans of them. And there's so many other staffing groups almost every week that are like hey, can we sponsor X, Y or Z? And I just, I don't want to over complicate things. Rock the boat. We got two that people are happy with. That's that.

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List of speakers they got. Register for Workflow Con via the link below. Start your free 14 day trial of financial cents using the link below with coupon code Jason10 Grab all that stuff down in the show notes Tax peeps, listen up. Do you have a tax workflow solution yet? I'm not talking about Graham Pappy's little auto scan, the awful intake OCR thing that comes with our dumpy old tax software. That's not what I'm talking about. There's a new crop of AI tax workflow tools that are doing some really, really cool things. One of the leaders here is this episode sponsor, Sorban. They're one of the first to this. They do a really, really good version of automated 1040 intake. A tremendous amount of the time spent during tax season is just chasing people for docs and like building out the request lists of all the things that we need. When the client emails and they're like what do you need from me? And you go back to the prior year file and you look at what you already have and you, you just got to do all that stuff. Sorban, man, it wipes out all of that complete no brainer tax Workflow tools like this is not an exaggeration. Are honestly like a must buy right now for tax firms. I'd say they have been for the last like two years and they just keep getting better. Sorban also, they're working on pushing the data to your tax software. Really hard problem to solve. They're working on it. They're also working on automated delivery. So ingest the tax return and then gives the client like a super smooth signing and sort of to do list experience once the return's actually done. Really good product. Know a lot of happy users. That's Sorban. Check out the link down in the show notes. That's Sorban. If you do more than a couple hundred ten forties a year, definitely check out Sorban. Link down in the show notes. So to me, there is an inevitability to offshoring. And as an entrepreneur, I'm pretty slow to be like opinionated about, you know, this thing is evil because it's stole somebody's job or something like that. Like when you are wearing the entrepreneur hat, frankly, those are oftentimes the things that you're looking for. Like you're investing in the machine that saves human labor hours. Like, there's no way of sugarcoating this stuff. Most of the time in small business, you got plenty of other things that those people can do. But if you're on the other side of this, where you're displaced by offshoring, you're displaced by AI. Like, yes, man, there's no way to sugarcoat that. That sucks. That is a downside of working for a bigger machine. It's a risk of, of working for a bigger machine. The number of folks that like, love the idea of going out and doing their own thing, but doing so feels risky. That has never made sense to me. Compare the risk of you having your own list of clients and a hundred people giving you money every year to the risk of you having one client, your employer, and at the snap of a finger, somebody can let you go. To me, the doing your own thing thing, while in the beginning it's spooky and you're like, man, how do I get my first clients? Long term, it feels like a vastly less risky thing to me. Especially in a changing era where small firms have the agility to like, fill the gaps of what do we need somebody onshore to do? What do we need a human to do? And AI is really good. Ultimately, in 2026, you and I have to be able to do something that an offshore individual can't do for a tenth the cost and that I can't do for a millionth of the cost. Right. And if we don't have a clear answer to what that is, that we can do that those things can't do, buddy. Like, that's not a strategy. We are living on borrowed time now. For most of us, the answer to that question, in fact the answer to both questions, offshoring and AI is I can sit across from that client and have a conversation with them. And I try not to. Like, I don't know, I sometimes I feel old fashioned when I say this, but I think we are still learning, like, just what parts of this stuff tech can never replace. And to be clear, like, I'm very like, aggressive AI. Like, I've been recommending like, responsible ways to use accounting AI for as long as anybody. But just to give you an example, and I've shared this on the podcast before. If, if you've been around for a bit, but we've got a chatbot that can see into every single episode of the podcast, it answers questions incredibly accurately. I mean, we're over 550 episodes of the pod now. I've talked about most things, including the question that we're talking about today several hundred episodes ago. Why are we talking about this again? This is actually a great, great advice if you are dabbling in creating content or, or being more visible online, for one, even if you did talk about it before, in all likelihood, nobody remembers. Second, even if they do, they, they forget the nuance and need to be reminded. Most people, we need to be reminded more than we need to be taught. It is on the 10th time that you hear that thing, that it sticks, and you're like, yep, no, I get that now. I'm going to go with it. And so this AI assistant that is a very, very accurate replica of me. We regularly share the link to it. But you know what doesn't change? People keep asking me questions. Quit bugging me with your questions. Go to this AI. It's just as good as me. We're running live workshops right now in 13 cities. We'll have over a thousand accountants out to these events in person. And you know what the last session of the day is? It's a Q and A and we never get through all the queues. Why are you leaving the house to come and ask me questions when we've got this AI thing? Give you all the A's your Qs need? I don't know, but people still do. And you know what people Come out. We do this thing in person. The vibes are off the charts, we have a great time. I don't understand what parts of this still require the human thing, but something still does for the same reason that people will spend thousands of dollars and fly across the country to go to a Taylor Swift concert when they could fire that thing up on Spotify in 10 seconds. Why that is the least efficient way you can listen to Taylor Swift music. So for most of us, the defense we have against both Offshore and AI, it is the human connection bit. And that can happen over virtual conferencing. We will see if over time the cultural barriers are eroded more there to where it matters less if you're onshore. But certainly the in person thing, that's a heck of an advantage. You don't need the in person person to like key in all the data and do all this manual stuff. But there is something to that human connection thing where we are still figuring out. And again, it feels old fashioned when it comes out of my mouth. But you know, in fact, I'll put it to you this way. We could do this very easily tomorrow. We could generate a 30 minute podcast and it would say the things that pretty much I would say. And for any new people tuning in, they would. The sound, they would not know the difference in the sound from my actual voice. Like, it's very, very good. But if I put out a 30 minute AI generated episode tomorrow, I maybe the first episode, it would be like fun in this novelty, right? But if I did that a second time, you would be insulted. I would be. I'd be like, what? I tuned in to like get this guy's take on stuff. I didn't tune in to just hear like slop, like noise. But it's. I mean, it's just as good of a coach as the real thing. In fact, in many ways it's more complete because it can go back across pretty much everything I've ever said and pull all those points together rather than just like what is top of mind in the moment. It'll even cite you back to the source and. And every time that I said that thing. And it'll do it instantly. 24 7. We could run a full MSNBC channel that is just Jason presenting to camera all day long, just going on at length about accounting firm things. Some people are like, it kind of already feels like you do that, Jason. We could do that. But like, I don't think anybody would be into that. There's not that same level of human connection there for Whatever reason. And that feels like long term where we remain. Because the doing of the work, it's changing fast. It really is. But I would argue that most accountants right now, our business is not in the doing of the work as it is overcoming whatever barriers there are for that entrepreneur that have anything to do with accounting or compliance and oftentimes even go well beyond that. The client comes to you with this thing and it is just like this thing you've never seen before. They're like, hey, can you do this for me? And you're like, do you know what I do? I'm a professional. I went to college. And they're like, yeah, but I can't figure out this form. And you're like, just because it's a form, you think I can do this? And like, yeah. And you're like, okay. And you complete the form. Even in a strong AI timeline, we're still going to have politicians, we're still going to have regulations, bank feeds are still going to break. No, that's. That shouldn't be a thing. That feels like our place long term. Now the reality is in the transition, like in the. The reality of the day to day of like how this is changing. And it sucks, man. I mean, you look at folks in creative fields with AI, right now you have AI sort of original sin of being trained on creative materials that it didn't have license to. And that sucks. But that toothpaste isn't going back in the tube, unfortunately. And so you have folks that are just super mad about AI because it is, you know, creating issues for their friends and stealing work and all these different things. But what do you do next? What do you do tomorrow? You look at the landscape and you figure out like, where can I feel good about operating within this? Because there is a certain inevitability to it.

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I went to my online community, realize almost 700 firms in there now. I literally typed in Thompson Reuters hosting. Somebody had asked the same question and like eight people in a row had commented that they absolutely loved Verito and had a great experience. That's honestly, that's why we started talking about Verito and now they're sponsoring our stuff. Okay, if you're on Virtual Office, you know what to do. Check out the link to Verito down in the show notes. Boo. You know what's the worst, man? When you hire somebody and they start working for you and you're like, I thought this person knew stuff. The number of times I've been hoodwinked by somebody that interviews well and they have umpteen years of experience and you pull them in and you're like, what? You did? You don't. What? You don't even know your stuff, man. This isn't going to work. Let me tell you what one of this episode's sponsors, Cloud Accountant Staffing, is doing about that. So Cloud Accountant Staffing, the help accounting firms find talent around the world, be it the Philippines, South Africa, Latin America. And they have an online portal where you can go out and see folks that they have recruited, schedule interviews with those people directly on their platform. And one of the things now that every single one of those people have is a collection of assessments. I'm looking at one right here. Assessments for business tax, for individual tax, for critical thinking, for understanding instructions, their personality type. And so many of these things like individual tax, this person I'm looking at, they're in the 93rd percentile. And so Cloud account Staffing, they have a huge volume of folks that they have go through these assessments and they hand pick the highest performers and they serve them up for you to make your wildest dreams come true. Cloud Account Staffing's backstory. They're actually ran an accounting firm, hired some offshore folks, had an amazing experience, and then just started helping other accounting firms do the same. Interested? I thought you might be. Check out the link down to Cloud Accountant Staffing in the show notes. There's a. I mean, there's a lot of problematic stuff right now. If you've seen all the humanoid robot Stuff. And every day you seem to see a new humanoid robot. And there's this notion that just around the corner we're going to have these in, in home, like household robots that could do all these cool things. In fact, when Tesla threw their big party like six months ago and they had all their robots, humanoid robots, out doing stuff and hanging with partygoers, every single one of those robots was remotely controlled by a human. So they were not just going around and doing their own thing. Similarly, what is this robot that we keep seeing? Is it, what's it called? Folk? Not folk, Neo. This new creepy looking humanoid robot that's been all over the news the last few weeks. They're saying it can be pre ordered right now for $20,000 and delivered in 2026 in their little sizzle reel demo video. All but like one or two shots had the disclaimer that the robot was being remotely operated by a human. And so like the mechanics of what a robot can walk around and do without falling over while being controlled by a human are much different than what we can expect from a robot that's just operating independently. Will it be my butler and go refill my glass when it sees my undies on the ground? Does it understand? But those are dirty. We got to get those things clean. Or is it going to fold them up and put them back in the stack? That's a, that's a pretty graphic example. But I can tell you how this is going to play out is those robots are going to be useful when remotely operated by a human far earlier than when they work on their own. Can you see where this is headed? I mean, this is already the case in all the demos and we are heading like straight towards a reality where you're gonna have a bunch of rich people with robots in their homes that are operated by folks in the third world. That almost feels inevitable. And that's pretty weird, pretty dystopian. This is like straight out of a sci fi movie. This sort of like surrogate sort of thing where it turns out there's actually a human behind the scenes controlling the robot. Sound like anything else? Sound like, I don't know, accounting AI for the last decade, these tech companies that actually are just like huge offshore shops behind the scenes, that is just going to keep happening. And you do have to like morally reconcile what's the version of this that I'm okay engaging with myself, hiring folks in the Philippines, paying them very, very well to come and do accounting work for me. I got no problem with that. And if you look at that in the perspective of, I think, the larger things happening in the world and how strange things are trending. Doing accounting work, paying bills, could be worse. Now, again, that doesn't take the sting out of people being replaced anymore. But this, to me, is yet another argument of you being in more control of your own destiny. If you're working for a big old machine, you kind of just along for the ride, whatever this looks like. And it is why big firms, they don't like me, man. I'm not going. And speaking at big firm stuff, because I give people the gift of agency. We tell them, do you realize you could also go do your own thing? Do you realize life's actually not that bad at the right small firms? Not a bad gig. You can go and do your own thing for sure. But you can also go and work for a small firm, make really good money, and actually feel some semblance of control over what's happening. And in my experience, this is where there is the most negativity and most hostility around Offshore, when it's like, my brother got replaced when they offshored that whole department. You know, stuff like that. To me, it is yet another argument. The small firm thing, man, it's not a bad gig. You combine offshore, you combine AI. All the stuff that's changing. And every layoff you see right now is being blamed. I feel like it used to be blamed on Offshore, or now it's being blamed on AI. Some of that is real. A lot of that is not real. It's a great way to dress up layoffs, which historically is a pretty negative signal for a business, and, you know, dress that up as something impressive. Oh, we don't even need these humans anymore because we're so ahead of the curve on AI stuff. If you've been impacted by that, man, that is. That is awful. But you and I, we still have to be able to say, here's what I can do that someone offshore can't do at a much lesser cost. And as we're looking at the future and our careers and how we run our business and all of that, we will always need to have an answer for that. So what are we in the business of doing that we are uniquely suited to do? That starts with specialized knowledge. What things do we have deep expertise in in a way that, like generalist AI tools don't starts with your network? Who do I know who's going to come to me when they need this thing? And third, what are the things that humans will kind of always need to do? Can you imagine a world where instead of listening to this podcast right now, you listened to an AI generated alternative? For me, there's versions of that that will be interesting that are more specific to you. In fact, we talked about this in a recent episode with Google's Notebook LM audio overview feature. The idea that we can create like podcast episodes about our clients financial results or the last week's activity. The accounting firm example was, wouldn't it be nice every morning if you could have, if your podcast listener have like a 10 minute CL talking through everything that happened in the practice management system yesterday. So you're like plugged into everything happening in the firm. For some people, that's really cool. So I do think there will be AI generated versions of things that are more specific to us. Oh, and if you've ever seen the Black Mirror episode where it's like Netflix, but everything is just AI generated real time just for you. Yikes, that's a spooky one. But I also think we will still tune into people, humans, curators. Like there is an artistry to still engaging and, and hearing the take of folks that we like. And that's how most of us consume these days. This is how I am. I don't sit and flip channels like we did growing up. There's, you know, three to five creators at a time where I will watch just about anything that they put out. I don't know why that is, but that's what I enjoy. That's how I learn. And for any one of those people, if they went out tomorrow and they did an AI version of that thing, I would frankly be offended. Even if it was as good of a coach or something as them, I'd be like, no, like, give me the real deal, man. And if you look around, you look at social media, you look at everything that's happening, there's more slop being pumped into the world than ever before. Low effort stuff, AI written stuff, AI driven support stuff. We're just interacting with AI everywhere. And the byproduct of that will be a greater premium on human stuff can be hard to visualize because it's not always clear when you say human stuff, what will that human stuff be? It'll definitely change. Like, the work that we will do will change either due to offshoring or due to AI. But every time I pose the question in like a live workshop, in a room full of people, where it was, where I'm like, wouldn't it be cool if we could spend less time keying information from that system into this other system and more time doing. This guy's in the front row with like a cup of queso and a soft pretzel. He's like, yeah, I feel like in many ways we still haven't bounced back from COVID and we're just like, we're so like, I don't know, chained to the desk in kind of a bummer way maybe. I'm especially feeling this way because I've been doing a bunch of live events lately and they're just, everyone is just like, man, I needed this. So I suspect the future is a lot more of that. I've also got an 8 year old daughter and if I think back to how I entered the profession, hope she doesn't have to go through the same thing. So I also don't want to root against the timeline where this stuff enables a better future. We shouldn't write that off too. Got any thoughts? Drop a comment, scroll down. There's probably going to be a busy one, I imagine. Gang, thanks for coming and hanging today. We'll find something less spicy for the next episode. Okay, I'll see you there.

A heads up for my podcast friends. We put together the biggest, scariest project my team has ever worked on. A big old run of live events around the country headed up until year end to to ensure that your 2026 is just the best year ever. Let me run you through the cities real quick. We're coming to Austin, Oklahoma City, Phoenix, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Nashville, Chicago, D.C. philadelphia, New York City and Boston with some super cool half day workshops that roll into dinners. You get CPE for it. It is an event that is built for your entire team to get the whole squad feeling inspired so that if you are a firm leader, you're not feeling like you got to put everything on your back. Headed into 2026 going to be a super fun experience. It's going to be something surprise guest at every city. We're gonna record an installment of the podcast live at each of these events. You're gonna be part of the podcast itself. What? And man, I would love to see you there. To learn more, head over to jasononfirms.com events and I hope to see you there.