548 How Accounting Firms Can Escape the Email Inbox

Most of us will spend more time on our email inboxes than practically anything else in the accounting firm. Today I want to kick off a new series around sort of radical elimination, because I give you all sorts of ideas for cool new things to do in a podcast, right? You can only do so many things. In fact, we're capable of focusing on fewer things than we think we can. So the secret to being able to do that next thing, like become the better version of yourself is elimination is getting rid of more than anyone else is getting rid of. Like that almost has to be the secret, what you don't do, because that enables you to do the cool next exciting thing, right? And so I thought, what better place to start today than email? Give you as clear of a framework as I can for how to just tame the beast, how to get help maybe for the first time, and spend less time in that inbox every day. This is something I successfully got out of in my 40 person firm. And now, and what I do now, I get a huge volume of inbound. So it's challenged me to push the envelope even further with what email delegation could look like. So today, let's get into this, a framework for how you can finally get out from under that inbox.

If you're new here, welcome to the Jason on Firms podcast where we talk all things running small accounting firms. A couple months back, I was hosting an event in Boston and somehow somebody threw out the question of like delegating the inbox, like pulling an admin into managing your email for the first time. And most of us kind of get blocked with, like, what about sensitive things that I don't want somebody else to see? Or this sense of pride where it's like, I've always done this myself. Like, I don't. It feels like giving up to get help with this, right? And so the conversation came up in this room and asked the question, who in this room has gotten help with their inbox? Like, who has pulled a team member in, maybe hired an admin or a va who is actively managing their email inbox for them every single day? Probably 60 people in the room. Two people raised their hands and I went to both of those people, the first one, I said, how did you do it? Would you recommend it? What are the traps that other folks should look out for? And they were very transparent from the standpoint that they hadn't figured it out fully yet. They were still working out the kinks and knew they hadn't made the most of it yet, but that it was game Changing from the day someone else was in there. They said it was, it was life changing having someone else that plugged in to what had previously been this hill that you were kind of forced to die on by yourself right now. I went to the second person that raised their hand and they were like, yeah, pretty much like across the team, we now manage email inboxes in just a fully shared way, not unlike how you actually like get work out the door, month end closes, tax returns. They shared how they just, they triaged that stuff collectively rather than any one person being hung out to dry. And both of these testimonials like in that room were like, it is life changing. And so we kind of zoomed out from those two specific examples and you consider that like room of 60 accounting firm leaders and it just kind of begs the question why, like why are more people not doing this? Because every single person in that room had the money to hire an admin to use a bit of a team member's time to help them with their inbox. So why don't we do this? Honestly, I think the question is like soft things. It is the vulnerability that it requires to pull somebody else in to raise your hand and say I need help. I tell you my experience with this in my accounting firm. I bought an 80 year old firm, found out several partners, I pulled an assistant into my inbox when the old partners were still around. And you better believe these guys are walking around the office going, you seeing this guy, you seeing the snowflake? You hear he's got a, he's got an assistant. Wow, that, wow. You want to talk about self important? This guy needs an assistant to send emails. That was the traditional culture of the firm for some reason like that. That was the example and so that was what everybody followed. You're going to die on that hill by yourself. And to raise your hand and ask for help that is somehow like a personal failing, you know. But if you, if you stop thinking about yourself for a moment, you think about somebody else in your team. Think about your most senior, most scarce team member. Say a client sends them a 65 page PDF that now needs to be chopped up umpteen different ways and annotated and saved in all these different places. This requires practically no technical expertise. Do you want your most senior person to go spend the next hour chopping up this PDF? Absolutely not. Right? Like that drives you nuts. Like this person is expensive. They are the bottleneck of the whole company. Probably we need them like best deploying what they are best at to get the most out of them. And that is not hustling documents. But as long as you yourself are not setting the example of being helpable, we can hardly expect the rest of our team to do the same, right? To ever raise their hand and be like, man, can somebody just come in and like, like, help me with this. This doesn't feel like the best use of my time. That won't happen until you do it, until you lead by example. And it may feel like you're being a snowflake. It definitely felt that way for me. Like there was this implication of like the entitlement of needing an assistant. Like how sort of hoity toity that sounds. Right? But the reality is whose time in the business is most important? It's yours, it's the senior leaders. And you can't do that next thing that you're excited about until we figure out how to, how to chop some stuff off the task list. And for most of us, we're spending two hours a day on average. Okay, gonna give you sort of a few steps for how to triage this. If you haven't pulled anyone else into your inbox before, I'm gonna give you some tactics of like, very common traps where this goes sideways. And then last, we're going to talk about like kind of the frontier of some of the more advanced stuff. Like myself now, I get inbound from probably over 100 people a day on email, on social media messaging, and on text. And so what does it look like to build a system that can actually handle that sort of volume without being reliant upon you? I think seeing some of those more advanced tactics makes the version one, the basic version, feel a little bit more tangled. Okay, first things first, around, like, what is the best tech for this? The reality is Outlook and Gmail make it very hard for you to sort of democratize the triage of email. Like they are kind of designed from the ground up to be for you to manage your personal inbox. But I would argue in an accounting firm there is no such thing as a personal inbox. If a member of my team is like, no, you can't see my email messages, I'm going to be like, heck yes, I can. These are my clients. Like, you've got important things coming in there, whether you're getting that stuff done or somebody else's, like, I get access to that. But your personal inbox, it's like it's the same thing. Like you could make the same argument. The inbox for most of us is the receiving bay. Of the accounting firm. Imagine having physical mailing addresses, like everybody in your firm having a different PO box and people going to the post office and being like, no, no, this is mine. I got, I got this one, guys, I'm going to handle this one myself. That would be dumb, right? In an accounting firm, that is what email is. That's not true of all businesses. Like you go to like, you know, big Fortune 500 companies. A lot of times email is just like internal company comms in an accounting firm. Like it is, it is how we get stuff in the door and so we need to triage it that way. Outlook and Gmail.

You can do a bit of this in Outlook and Gmail with like delegated access to inboxes, but it is not a very streamlined process. Some practice management systems will now connect to your email inboxes. But again, this is more for CRM purposes. I would say very few practice management systems in the accounting space right now, like the email offering and composing process is good enough. There's maybe two or three practice management systems where it's good enough. I. Otherwise you are better off looking at a dedicated email management tool. So I'm a big fan of Missive. We did a video on the main channel not that long ago about how to manage email in a more team based way with Missive A front is another popular one here. There are tools for this for managing huge volumes of email across a team and those tools are not Outlook and Gmail. You can bodge this together. Like step one is probably fine, is pulling an assistant in and just giving like delegate email access to that assistant. But that's not usually going to be a long term solution. And like more dedicated tools for this give you more flexibility around like sharing access to your inbox, but no old messages, you know before the day you share it, that sort of thing. And some of that might be nice. And if it gives you any more confidence to get started, then like yes, like consider picking up another tool to make this easier.

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Number one is just pull somebody in to help with the obvious. Most of Our email inboxes. There's like a huge percentage of things that come in there that are just instant archives. And throughout this whole thing, it is worth being more aware of the addictiveness of email. The reason that we leave email up all day long is it is not unlike social media, where it's something we can kind of tick off and it almost makes us feel useful. And we can dress this up and like, oh, no, I'm being helpful. I'm delivering great customer service. By responding to an email right away. It's like there is a dopamine hit that comes from triaging these little basic emails that we need to get away from. Because the thing that will ultimately help your business long term is for you to have the time and space to do deep work, to work on something for two hours or four hours at a time, right? Those quick little dopamine hits like they are a trap. And most of us end up stuck in that loop for years. And that's just what you've got up on your third monitor. Your fourth monitor is email, and you're just perpetually distracted by it. So, like, the step one here is honestly not even like giving the admin a clear framework. Besides, just get the stuff out of here that very obviously I don't need to be the one to handle. And this oftentimes looks like unsubscribing from a whole bunch of stuff that you don't really need to be having in your inbox. But don't overcomplicate the starting. When it comes to who the right person is for this, you really want someone that is proactive, not someone that is sitting back and waiting for you to dictate every step along the way. You want someone that can apply the brain cells to keep pushing the envelope and even challenge you sometimes to be like, help me understand why exactly it is that you need to be the one to do X, Y or Z. If you feel like you're having to push them too much, that's probably not the right person. And this is the sort of thing that is made vastly easier by having someone with experience doing this. If you've got someone that has helped with this for the last decade that can come in on day one and be like, yeah, here's what I've seen work in this situation and that situation that is going to be so helpful for you. The last thing someone who struggles with delegation needs is having to, like, force people to take work off of your plate. They gotta understand that is their job here for them to Proactively pull as much of this stuff from you as they can. And is there a risk that they go too far? Like, maybe. But, like, you set some of those boundaries, and the easy boundaries in the beginning are, like, you're not sending anything as me. If there's stuff that you're unsure of, like, tag them that you're unsure. And I will clarify. Like, no, these things are always fine. These things are not. But step one is just getting someone in there to handle the obvious stuff that doesn't need to come to you. Step two is to scrutinize what remains. Because ultimately, we're trying to get to a point where everything in the firm has an owner that is not you. Or at least have more intentional guardrails for, like, here's what I handle. I handle HR. I handle hiring. I handle these 20 clients. And then we can really police if something comes in the inbox that is not one of these things. Why did it end up here? Because what many of us do, like, how we get stuck in this cycle, is we will swoop in and be the hero on things throughout the firm because we're the boss. Or someone will send something to you to kind of bail them out, and we bail them out. And so the next time the same thing happens, they send it right back to you. Because that's the easiest solution, Right? And so, like, before jumping straight into, like, here's how to classify every single email and what should the home be for X, Y, and Z? Usually you gotta push back a little bit on the people who are sending these emails to be like, you know, my case, in my firm, it was like, we got 40 people that work here. Am I really the only person in the business that can solve this problem? Or are you just coming to me because I've been the one to bail us out in the past? Usually the answer was the latter. And so we go back to that person, and we kind of, like, try to give them some confidence and say, hey, let's talk this through. Let's think through how you can solve this problem yourself. Like, this is something that ultimately I want you handling. Dan Martell has a pretty good framework for this, where people aren't allowed to just come to him with a question. They're able to come with three possible solutions and a recommendation. So somebody absolutely has to come to you. They need to put in more work than to just ask you the question. Honestly, this is oftentimes, like, professional laziness. Like, I don't want to have to put my neck on the line to make this decision or to make this call or whatever it is. And so they just ask you to do it. And we will oftentimes bail them out. The very minimum amount of pushback we can give them here is give me three options, three ways we could do this, and your recommendation. Then they at least are forced to think through, like, what are the potential paths here? And is there one that is obvious? And I just need to do that because oftentimes the mental cycles are not actually put into that before the question is sent. So step one, we're getting somebody into the inbox to help with the obvious stuff, the admin, like the promotional stuff, like the stuff that just shouldn't be in the inbox. Step two is we are considering of what remains. Why is this stuff still coming to me? And does it really need to. Step three is to just get explicit about what is left. So we've trimmed the fat here. We've got a more lean list of emails. For some of us, this is like 10% of what originally came in the inbox because you just got so much crap coming in there. Others of you, it may be more like 50% of what's left. But let's put these into buckets. There is client service, maybe the biggest bucket, but then within that there are who are the clients that I still manage myself. And so in my firm, getting out of doing all of the client work is. It looked like, well, every single client has to have an owner that is not me. And so then those messages ultimately get redirected to who the client owner is. That person responds and copies me rather than me responding directly. And this is something you can be explicit around. And even getting from like, here's the 40 clients that I managed to. Here's the 20 clients that I manage. Like, even that is progress. But the rules of the road need to be the rules of the road. And your admin can help enforce that. This is why I went with a pretty high level person to do this. It was an operational person who came in as an admin, but was like an overachiever from day one. They were, I mean, they were making good money and I was okay consuming the time of somebody that we were paying good money because ultimately my time was still more valuable. And oftentimes we raced to the bottom of like, okay, how cheaply can I get this done, buddy, this is your time. Like, there is nothing in the business more valuable than this. So don't be afraid to pull somebody in who can do this at a very High level. So client service, I suspect is going to be a lot of the stuff that's coming in there. But also think about things like who works with your software vendors? Like who troubleshoots, you know, an issue, be it technical or licensing with a software vendor. Who's handling specific, like technical issues, Be them like specific tax expertise, state and local tax, like very domain specific stuff. On the bookkeeping side, maybe it's like specific integration issues. Who owns that, who's handling sales, who's handling onboarding, who's handling hiring, networking, hr? Do you have a marketing partner that somebody's working with? Don't be afraid of firing yourself from too many jobs. Don't be like, well, if I don't do this anymore, what will I do, buddy? There is always another thing around the corner because I just said a whole bunch of words where you're probably like, yeah, no, nobody else. None of us really do that. At least not to a very good level. Those are all the important things that will like drive the long term health of the firm. Where do you find your next great person? Where do we find our next a client? Like, there's so many areas in the business that are just begging for us to invest time in them, but we can't do it until we get out from under. Just the triage, the plotting, the stuff that's just coming in the door every single day. So very basic framework here. Step one, don't overthink it. Pull somebody in to help with the obvious. Don't build this like big humongous plan. Like you could literally just send them this podcast and that's enough to get started. Step two, scrutinize what remains. Are people sending me this thing because I was the hero last time and I need to put this back on them a bit to handle it, or am I really the only person in the business that can handle it? And if I am, then in step three, let's classify what all of those things are that are still coming to me. And then you've got a stack of like, okay, these are the six things still coming to me. Maybe it's these 40 clients. It is this domain and tax stuff that I don't really have anybody else that I can push that work to. Maybe it's marketing, maybe it's working with the recruiter. I don't remember how many were at, but you got that stack of things. And then you can prioritize like which of these things are really not bringing me energy, where I could go to someone in the firm or Seek out someone that we could pull into the firm that could then manage that thing for me. And now we've got an explicit list of things that we are whittling down. And the email problem, we've got our arms around it and we're on a track to reducing to getting out from under more of that stuff rather than just being pulled in whatever direction we get pulled. Now, a few tactics here. As a rule, you should never be the first person to see an email. This means you're not opening the inbox until somebody's had a chance to go through it. And it probably means you're not even working out of the inbox folder. Working out of the inbox folder is like running in quicksand. Like there is more stuff getting piled into there than you can realistically get out. And so if it needs to go through the filter of someone else first. In my case, that looked like my admin had to get through the inbox by 10am because I was going to work on email from 10 to noon. Worst case scenario, I'd be in there at 10 every single day. In the beginning, I needed even more time than that. By the end, I was in and out of there in 20ish minutes. And that was the only time I would touch email all day. And I was able to work on real problems the rest of the day rather than leaving my email up all day. And triaging other people's fires does not go without saying, but don't leave your email open all day again. We gotta like detox from that dopamine hit of being able to go out there and archive a thing and nice work. That's. I mean, I think a lot of people, they let a whole bunch of trash come into their inbox because it feels good to get rid of it. Buddy. Talk about absolute wasted effort. You have only so many hours on this planet. You're gonna spend it letting robots send you messages that you can then archive. Like, this is the candy crush of professional work. Pure waste. Don't do that stuff. Get that email off your off your sixth monitor.

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Tell us exactly how you're doing this. And you know who they were using? This episode sponsor Team Up. No lie. They were using. Team up is basically just a recruiting group that works exclusively with accounting firms. They go out and find you the most talented accountants in the Philippines to go and work directly on with you. You pay the accountant directly. No middle, middle folk taking their own cut. Team Up's just going to be there to help you find a super talented accountant, place them into your firm, usually 4,000 bucks for a placement. Compare that to Robert half charging you quarter million dollars. And actually heard the other day somebody had to pay a body organ to get an onshore accountant. That's not a lie. Team up 4,000 bucks. They're going to find you a super talented and capable accountant. My last four hires in my accounting firm were in the Philippines and they were fantastic. Honestly, it totally changed how he staffed in our firm and got our stuff done. I actually talked with another accountant the other day who's like, I think I'm going to go start a, a Philippine staffing agency because we are having so much luck with the folks we're finding in the Philippines. I know you're like, not another one. Anyways, there's a reason people are doing this because it turns out accounting is a universal language. Kind of in some ways yes, in other ways, no. But people don't hop over the border and then all of a sudden not know how to do what we do in our accounting firms. Does that. Am I making sense? You know what I'm saying? If you haven't done this before, you're gonna have a whole bunch of questions. Just hop on a call with the people who have done it. More than anyone else, the folks placing accountants in the firms would encourage you to do that with Team Up. Check out the link down in the show notes. Okay. Another tactic, generally you never want to have somebody pretend to be you. Instead you just work out, like, how do they explain stepping in to respond to a message that you got? So for your admin, this usually looks like, you know, hey, client, I beat Jason to the punch here, but wanted to get this over to you. You know, if they ask for tax return, copy financial statements, something that they can answer, then yeah, they can jump in, reply from their own email address, probably copy you, but in most cases they can still archive that message out of your inbox if you don't need to know about it. But I personally am not a fan of folks replying out of my inbox as if they are me. Now. Another tactic here, this was a big unlock for us and our firm. You need to have a mechanism for sharing. FYI is in batch because if you're, you're afraid of being like fully out of the loop here, there are going to be situations where you just need to know what happened, but like in a one sentence format. And so what my team would do is they would, they would draft messages not only to myself, but to other team members that they were helping facilitate things for. They would have a draft message going all day long. And there's at a bullet point anytime there was an FYI that that person needed to be aware of. So if it's like, you know, they need a copy of tax return because they're applying for financial aid for somebody that's, you probably don't need to know about that. But if it was something that somebody else could solve, that would still be good for me to know that it's happening and that it's going on. That's just a single line, an FYI. And then they send out that email at the end of the day. And it's. It's 20 FYIs that I can just skim through in batch so that I'm still in the loop but didn't have to do that work myself. And so that was literally just an email message, subject line, FYI, and the date and a bullet list of everything that I should be aware of. Now, this all started with me. We kind of started with this system and managing my own inbox, but we began using elements of that to support other senior team members as well. And we're really trying to build a culture of, like, nobody really needs to die on this hill on their own. If you're going on vacation, you should not be checking your email. Like, we have other people that can check your email. And that is a infinitely more healthy work environment than one person who came into my office who was like, yeah, I'm going to be gone two weeks, but don't worry, we'll be driving into town each day where I have data and will check my email each day. When we come back into town, I'm like, brother, you mean to tell me that nobody else can can take a look at these things while you're out? And he was like, very new, very junior. And he's like, well, actually, yeah, pretty much anybody can do what I do, so it really doesn't require me. He just didn't know that he had permission. And at the time, we were like, only rolling outlook for this stuff. He didn't even technically know how to get somebody else into that inbox to even get help. You don't want to run a business like that, man. Like, that sucks being that just chained to your inbox. Okay. A few sort of like, next level things. You look at like, Gary Vee, like, he's a big online personality. They have a text number that you can text anytime and get a response. Do you think that's Gary Vee responding? No, it sure isn't. That guy's got millions and millions of followers. Probably gets an outrageous volume of stuff coming in every single day. A couple months back, I gave away my cell phone number on social media, and I was like, hey, we're launching the world's first free coaching service for accounting firms. And everybody's like, wow, thank you so much. This is so generous. He is like, I'd already been like, I respond to 50 plus messages a day answering people's questions and all that. So it's a bunch of stuff I'd already been doing. We just dressed it up in a different way that people got excited about. But do you really think the, like, forever plan with that is for me to be sitting there just like slogging away, responding to people's messages all day long? It absolutely isn't. We have had, I don't know, probably about like 3 or 400 people get in touch over text now in the last couple of months. And immediately you start noticing patterns of what are people asking about, what are the very common things. And so even with an insane volume of this stuff, you can build systems, you can get help from the team, the folks on your team get more confident responding in your voice. This is like next level, more advanced stuff. I wouldn't recommend this, especially if you've never delegated your inbox. I wouldn't recommend jumping to people responding in your voice. But in this case, like, this is a huge volume of folks that are not even clients in the traditional sense that are responding, asking for help. But you want to talk about, like, good marketing. It is. It's being helpful at scale. Like, if you say you're doing tax for beekeepers or bookkeeping for beekeepers, like, roll out some sort of free support service, like, yeah, for sure. You got to put like disclaimers on that stuff and be like, this isn't tax advice. We're generalizing here. Like, the application is going to depend very much on your own situation. But creating time and space to be helpful at scale, that is the best type of marketing you can have these days. But there's a version of this that even you could, you could tippy toe into. And so the, the start of that is having someone else draft a reply for you to review and approve. And a lot of email tools like Missive has this. You can even use this with juniors who maybe don't have a huge amount of confidence replying to clients directly yet, where they can draft a message and you can have a whole approval workflow where that goes to some other more senior member of the team that can sign off on that message before it goes out the door. You can do the same for people trying to triage more stuff out of your inbox. So this probably goes beyond what your admin does for you and instead relies on your admin sending that email to a subject matter in the expert in the firm, like probably a member of the professional staff. They throw together a draft response, you hop in, either approve it or change a couple things and send it off and now you are getting through that backlog, like, even the stuff that needs to come to you, and in record time. We've been talking a lot on the podcast lately about scoping not only what services you're providing, but how you deliver those services. And one big question mark, there is access to the business owner, access to the big boss or whoever the senior person is that they've always had access to. Even in situations where that person has access to you, you can get help from your team. All that really means to me is that the response is going to come to you, come to you, come from you. And so it is not to say that someone else can't come in and help draft a response. Right? You got to be careful, like not taking that too far and sort of cheapening the value of access to you. But if we're thinking about a team based approach to all communications, even on the clients that you manage, why does every single response need to be developed 100% by you? And honestly, this more advanced stuff, like this may be kind of hard to imagine right now, but this more advanced stuff is why it is so imperative that we as soon as possible start with the basic stuff. You can't get to the really, really cool version of this without starting at the really, really basic version of this. And I cannot tell you how many people I've talked to who are like, it has changed my life, like, I will never go back. And honestly, I'm still, to a degree, I'm stuck on the why. I think it is a pride thing. I think it is a privacy thing. Maybe being unwilling to share certain things with another human being. And for sure, like, you know, HR stuff in the company, you just have to find a different channel to send that stuff than email. For most of us, that's like logging into your payroll platform. That's where most HR stuff ought to live now, not being sent out via, you know, company emails. But that is, that is probably the biggest counterargument that I hear is like, well, where does the sensitive stuff go, buddy? If all we gotta do is find a new channel for the sensitive stuff, the upside to doing so is humongous because we've now overcome this sort of like misplaced propriety over our own inboxes. But this is a. This is a quarter of your time for most of us, two hours at least. That is the lowest hanging fruit to get help with. I mean, that is going home at three instead of going home at five over the course of weeks and months and years. It's a Tremendous amount of time. If I had to push you to eliminate one thing, it would be email. Chatted with a lady in an event not that long ago who got super sick for two months. And she said the most valuable thing that I learned was that I could go two months without emailing. My team could handle it. Nothing broke. I mean, some things broke, but the business survived. I'm not encouraging you to get sick for two months, but there's a world where you don't touch email. Like we're talking about that in my business right now. Like what would it take for me to not have to touch email, to not have to touch social media? Because there are vastly better ways for me to spend my time building bigger, more useful things if I can get some of that time back. It's absolutely a possibility for you, but it will never be within reach until we start with the basic version of this. It is a great example of something that will feel much more accessible if you can surround yourself with other people doing the same. If you know other folks that are considering this. In fact, pop a comment at the bottom of the YouTube video here. Anybody wanna hop on a zoom and chat about this? Or meet every month, something like that? This is the sort of thing that we do in my online community. Realize a bunch people are working on a specific thing and they find a couple other folks that are working on the same and they just meet every week or meet every month to talk about how it's going. That is a huge help when you're trying to do something that feels hard and feels new. Last thing I wanna point you to, we talked about this a couple years ago on the podcast. It is Tim Ferriss fear setting exercise. It's really, really good. Basically I'll link this down in the show notes. Basically it's a little like framework to flesh out this idea that you are afraid of. Because scary things and ambiguity, like you can't really solve for those until you take the time to really dig into what about this am I afraid of? And how justified is it? How big is the potential downside? And even if the worst case scenario came to head, what would I do? Oftentimes it's not that big of a deal. Richard Branson talks about this a lot. The whole idea that people see him doing a lot of risky things, but he's like, what I actually think that I'm very good at is having a plan for the downside. As long as you can have a plan for the downside, then what do you have to be afraid of if you are spooked about this email thing, go to the Show Notes. Check out this fear setting exercise. It's really cool. It's just a way to in 20, 30 minutes kind of flesh out like what is it that I'm actually afraid of and how do I build factoring that sort of into the plan so that the worst case scenario really isn't going to be all that bad. Anytime I'm super stuck on something and like overwhelmed, I will do this exercise. And on the other side of it, like I just have a much clearer picture of what it is that I'm trying to do, what are the most important aspects of it and how to actually build a plan that ensures that even if it did go totally cattywampus, it would be fine. It wouldn't be that big of a deal. And it going sideways actually isn't that scary because I know what the off ramp looks like already. If this is something you've done before, pull somebody in to get help on the email inbox. You got any sage words of wisdom? Drop that stuff down in the comments. I'm pretty excited for like I want to build this into a whole series, a whole playlist around sort of, you know, radical elimination. Like what can we eliminate? Because I really think that is the secret to us Getting to version 2.0 of us is actually what we eliminate. Not the next idea, but what we eliminate. And so if you have any other thoughts around, like what's something that that maybe I could get away from, but I need a more clear framework for how to do. So drop that stuff down in the comments too. Got some ideas for what the next few elimination episodes could be, but I want to get your thoughts there as well. Gang, thanks for being here today. Encourage you to take the leap on this email stuff. I'll catch you in the next one.

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 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, DC, Philadelphia, NY City and Boston with some super cool half day workshops that roll into dinners you get CPE for. 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 gotta put everything on your back, headed into 2026. Gonna be a super fun experience. It's gonna be a 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.