567 This Accounting Firm Is OVER CAPACITY

Today, we are coaching a real accounting firm. Someone with a problem that is all too common among accounting firms today. They are at capacity. They don't need more work. That'll actually just make their problems worse. So when you find yourself in that situation, what do you do? This individual, it's actually a really cool story. How they came to be an accounting firm owner just reminds you of just how like, cool accountants are who are going out and doing their own thing, like just how brave that is, how much courage that requires. And in a world full of people that mainly are just working for the man. Right. But we're getting tactical today, and I want you to see into this accounting firm and give you the opportunity to play coach. We, we end up fixated on our own business all day, every day. Right? But you find when you look at somebody else's business and you can put that advisor hat on, it's a little easier to, to point out the flaws maybe in their model than it is in your own. Lot of stuff this firm is doing. Right. We'll dig into a few, a few opportunities of things that they can do even better. Really cool story. Let's talk. Okay. This information, it was submitted to me anonymously by the form that we use for, for all of these style of episodes. We call it Roast Affirm. Basically, I get a bunch of information about your firm. We go through it, highlight the stuff that you're. You're doing best at, and highlight where there are opportunities. That intake form, I'll link it down in the show notes, complete that form, and you might just show up in a future roast episode. These are, these are like my favorite episodes to do. I've met a ton of these people in the wild too, out at my events who are like, yeah, you did a video on my firm. It was the X, Y and Z. It's really fun. But let me give you the story of this accounting firm. It's super cool. This is a small firm, was a solo firm until just recently. But the issues that they're dealing with and the solutions to those issues are like universal accounting firm problems that are going to be relevant to everybody. So this firm, 60% of their revenue comes from bookkeeping. 40% of their revenue comes from tax. They're projected to do. They're projected to do 150k in revenue for 2025. They're in SoCal, so pretty good sized market. They do work for three local clients on site. They drop in for an hour each week, and everything else is remote from their home office. They Have a shared office space that they can use during tax season to meet with clients, but would love to minimize or eliminate the in person meetings which are very draining and in their opinion, very inefficient. Now to the question of who is their best type of client that they have right now. They say their dream client is willing to pay a healthy fee to do things my own way as long as everything they need gets done on time. They're responsive to questions and willing to provide anything I ask for that makes my job easier. They give me access to collect their documents myself. They also agree to automate my monthly fee payment. Now a lot of you are already yelling at the screen, shouting into your air Bob, your clients don't all let you automatically pull a monthly fee. This is a theme of this episode is when we don't realize just how much we are like living within our own little box of our own little reality. What's normal for us is just a product of what our business looks like today and what our clients that we have today will say to us. And it's not until you see into other people's businesses that you see just how much more is is possible and how limited our thinking is. Is oftentimes when we look at firms maybe ahead of us in the journey, we'll see what they're doing and the rates that they're charging and we're like, and that feels wrong or I don't understand what's going on here. There's something messed up about that. But maybe you look at somebody that's earlier than you on the journey or not charging as much and you're like, what are you doing? It's so obvious what the solution is, right? Just know we are all operating on the same food chain. There will always be a firm that's bigger, a firm that's more premium, whatever qualifier you want to put on that. And there will always be others that are, that are below you or before you on that same progression. But what we have to be really careful of doing is being quick to like punch down or be like, how do you not see what the very obvious solution here is? But then when we do that, when, when we look up at the people who may be a bit ahead of us, we can't dismiss what they're doing because when they look down at you, they're saying the same things. So if the solution looking downward is, is plain as day to you because you've already crossed that bridge, know that there are more bridges to be crossed and we ourselves don't have everything figured out. We have to listen to our peers and what the people ahead of us on that journey are saying as well. For a lot of people, it's a one way street. You can, you can look down at the folks who are behind you and you're like, ah, you don't have it figured out. We think we're at the top of the mountain, but there was a day when we were all here. So this was the definition of their best client. Somebody willing to pay a healthy fee, they're responsive to questions and they'll let them pull a monthly, a monthly payment. Now there's another question here. Who is your second best type of client? They said the ones who will allow me to work fully remotely and pay their invoices on receipt. We're going to talk positioning, but let me get you through the rest of the story here. The makeup of the team. They said they've worked alone for the past 15 years building a side hustle alongside their other accounting jobs until they were able to go full time about four years ago. Awesome. I've recently hired one part time admin assistant as I had maxed out the work I could do alone. She's inexperienced but very anxious to learn and has performed very well so far. Pricing for bookkeeping, I've crept up to a 95 an hour rate. You can even, you can even hear it in how they're saying it. Like, like they're almost not comfortable with it. Yet I've crept up to a 95 an hour rate. An element of like, you're still proving to yourself that you're even worth that. Right. And they review pricing every two years. For clients with a standard set of tasks per month, the monthly rate ranges from $250 for minimal involvement to 1,600amonth. I've grown more comfortable asking for higher rates and never had any complaints, which could mean I'm still too low. I don't even need to tell you, you know, you know the answer to that. If nobody's complaining, of course it's too low. Sales and marketing, I don't want any new business as I'm overloaded. But I'm constantly getting referrals from existing clients and friends. I've never advertised or marketed my business pains. I have so many manual systems and paper checklists that work okay. But as my workload has grown, I'm barely keeping up. I did 175 tax returns last season and it was excruciating. It was my first year with new software. They Switched from Lacert to Drake. So they expect next year to be better, but they're dreading it. On the positive, what they enjoy, they love the variety of work and the freedom of controlling their own schedule, especially control over their own finances. They need more money. They just work more. They said. I get bored easily sitting in one place for too long, so working from home gives me the chance to take breaks when needed. Here's kind of the backstory, though. This is what I absolutely loved. And this is. I mean, there are so many flavors of accounting firm out there, and this just encapsulates to me the really cool diversity of different types of people and stories that got them to running an accounting firm. They said they've always worked in bookkeeping jobs and had an employer who encouraged them to learn tax work as well. They took a break from working while their kids were young, only helping their husband run his business. When my kids went off to college and we divorced, I returned to my old job contacts who happily took me in. And I began slowly building my skills and clientele and have reached both my goals, becoming an enrolled agent and building an independent solo practice. This last year, I realized I needed help and was lucky enough to meet a young lady who's very ambitious and excited to learn all she can. I'm now 60 years old and would love to be able to turn everything over to her and retire in the next seven years. Man, doesn't get any better than that. That's so cool. And honestly, the whole framing of how we do this, the whole roast affirm, like, the whole idea of it is like, we're going to find the flaws in your accounting firm and hopefully it's done through a positive lens. Right where it's like, no, these are, these are kind of the opportunities. We just can't lose sight of the fact that the people who are out there doing this, this is not an easy thing to do by any, any standard. It just isn't like you are in the 1% of the 1% of the people who had the courage to go out and do their own thing. And this to me just sums up, like, the beauty of the flexibility of being able to run your own firm. Like, there's just very few gigs that are this good in my mind now, all that being said, the way I approach everything in my life is this is the worst it's ever going to be. And so how do we start baby stepping to something better? I've got three steps here, and they're all kind of around positioning and who you're choosing to work with. Ultimately, if you're at capacity and you've hit a wall where you're like, I can't do any more work, then the next step has to be about positioning. The trap here is for people to think the next step needs to be about tech and processes and hiring. It doesn't. The reality is your capacity today is what it is. The first thing to fix is what you are running through the machine, not the machine itself. And like, the basic economics behind this are, I mean, even if you just, you, you math it out and you say, okay, I'm at capacity right now, uh, what do I do next? Do I hire another person? Well, that person's just going to bring more work into the business. You're now going to have one more person to manage in addition to all the other responsibilities that you have right now. Is it realistic that you can do what you're doing today and manage another person and all that goes into that? That's the hiring path. If you think I'm going to, I'm going to get out from under this capacity problem by using better tech and better systems. Let's say you go out and you, you buy a new piece of tech and it's super successful and it saves you 30% of your time. Great. Awesome. What is the impact ultimately on the business, on the bottom line? Well, you're paying for new tech. Maybe it lets you take on some additional work. So I mean, if you kept working as hard, Maybe that adds 20% to the bottom line. I don't know. But let's compare that to rethinking what you're running through the machine, what work you're doing, how much of it you're doing, and how you're pricing it. The average margin for an accounting firm, about 30%. And that, that number gets messy with small firms and single owner firms where, like, how do I factor in the value of, of what I'm doing here? Right, but let, let's get aggressive. Let's say it's a 50% margin firm. This math is what makes managing and curating your client list and thinking about pricing the most important thing you can do in a 50% margin firm. In order to double the profitability of a project, I need that person to pay me 50% more. Right. So if it was a hundred dollars a month project, 50% margin, we're making 50 bucks a month. Right. But in order to make a hundred dollars a month on the same work, I would need them to pay me 150 instead of a hundred dollars a month. Now here's the thing that most of us don't realize is we have a whole bunch of clients on the client list already who would happily pay you that price. This person has all of the signals of a client list chock full of people who would happily pay you more. And if we think about this, I mean, just coming back to the example of a hundred dollars a month project, somebody then paying you $150 a month and it being twice as profitable. Compare that a 100% increase in profit to that workflow example where it made us 30% more efficient and maybe that boosts the bottom line like 20%. At the end of the day, there is nothing more important than who you're doing work for and what they're paying you to do that work. And so the solution to capacity, to getting back more of your time is it is just having a better approach for how we price our work. They mentioned that nobody's ever complained about prices. They mentioned that they're getting referrals hand over fist from the folks that they work with today. In a world where there's more just AI over hyper Y than ever before and you see a new landing page every day that's like, whoa, this sounds exciting. But then you can't actually tell if there's anything real going on there. When all that's going on, it's nice to know what things actually work, what are real, what is tested and firms are big fans of. I'll give you one. What firms are like actively using and having success with. I'll give you one tool, Stanford Tax buddy. They were kind of first aboard, like the AI Tax workflow hype train, but they're now, I don't know, three or four years in. I know probably well over 100 accounting firms that love Stanford Tax is a really, really good solution for better organizing your 1040 work. It gives you a single place where you can pile all those documents in. It creates this like AI checklist based on the prior year tax work of exactly what items we need from the client. Then I can just chuck all those documents into one place, regardless of how they come in, and it'll automatically check those items off the checklist and then give me like an actual, like work paper in the cloud as an alternative to an Adobe Acrobat PDF. Whether your clients want to work with another port portal or not, there's a lot of people that are just now using Stanford Tax internally because it saves you a pile of time on the just the managing of the documents and all that stuff. It's a great company. They've been around an AI accounting solution that's actually really, really good. Worth checking out if you do 1040 work. Learn more about Stanford Tax. Check out the link down in the show notes. Hey, do you enjoy managing your it? Trick question. Of course you don't. That's awful. You got better things to do than to be playing it. Night Janitor Kay. That's where this episode's sponsor, Verido. They can help. They will be your entire IT department. Because you know what? They do it for hundreds of other accounting firms. In fact, they only do it for accounting firms. Compare that to hiring the IT guy down the street. Oh, I am speaking from experience here. Hire the IT guy down the street. And he comes in and we're like, yeah, here's the problem. And he's like, what on God's green earth is this app, man? And I say, well, this CCH engagement. And he says, okay, give me a week to figure out how this app works and then I will fix your small problem. That's what you're paying for working with IT Groups that don't just support accounting firms, Barretto. They know their stuff, man. This is all they do. This is their lives. They'll migrate you over a weekend and actually recently learned they have. They've had like this five minute sort of support guarantee or something like that. They said average response time from support, like 20, 24, 7, you can call. Average response time was less than five minutes. They actually told me recently average response time is now less than 60 seconds. 24 days a week, 7 hours a day. 24, 7. That's a bad joke to make. That's. That's not clear. 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Verdo. They will also do your WISP. 500 bucks flat fee. They'll do the required security thing that you have to have as a tax firm in the US and they'll do all your hosting. Stop paying Thompson. Stop paying Drake. Don't pay the provider of the software for hosting. You can get it from Verito way faster, way cheaper. I know a ton of firms that are weirdly like raving fans of Barado. Honestly, like, it's a weird thing to be so excited about, but if you're getting that it sorted out for 2026, man, like, now is the time to do it. Learn more about Bardo down at the link in the show notes. A really hard lesson that I learned in my accounting firm is that the people who most aggressively referred me to others were the people who were getting a screaming deal. Honest to goodness. We had, I mean, this was an 80 year old firm that I'd bought and so it had like every type of sort of what are the things that attach themselves like whales and sharks and stuff like that. If our firm was the whale or the shark, we had a whole lot of those barnacles just hanging off every little bit of the firm because it was everybody's friends and mom and grandma and, and Sunday school teacher and all those people had just been getting rolled forward for decades. And so we had a bunch of folks that were getting a killer, killer deal. And you know what they did is they told all their friends about it and then their friend comes in. What are you going to do? Are you going to charge the friend five times as much? Because that's your market rate for a new client. No, you're probably going to charge them what the other person is getting charged. And the problem just gets worse. This is why exclusively relying on referrals is a trap is in my experience, unless we're proactively asking for referrals, your referrals will actually skew to be more towards the discounted folks. And I mean, we, like, this is the hard thing is we think it's because these people absolutely love us and they might love us. I guess these, these things aren't mutually exclusive. But don't misattribute to love what might simply be price or value relative to what they're paying. Because if they value what you do five times more than what they pay for it, of course they're going to be incredibly happy and they're going to tell everybody about it. Right. And that is where referrals can actually take you down the opposite path of, of where you want to go now. The right way to handle referrals is to figure out who is my A client on the client list today, where if I had a few more of those, it would change my life. Those are the folks we proactively go out to and we say, hey, where are your friends hanging out? Where do you read? Do you listen to podcasts like where are you learning? Are you going to any events? And that's kind of my first suggestion to this firm is we have to start working towards selectivity. We have now, for maybe the first time, the ability to be selective. Amazing. The client list is full, we're at capacity. The game has now changed. Where we can, as much as we can, try to sort of escape the scarcity mindset that we've probably had forever and sort of flip the script to be like, okay, I actually have a degree of control over this now. I'm not just sitting back and subject to whatever the universe sends my way. I can actually influence some control over the universe, like, through the things that I decide to do, because I've got plenty. And operating a business from a place of plenty is completely different than building a business for the first time. It's a totally different skill that you got to learn how to manage. And it's. It's also a trap, because getting to plenty oftentimes doesn't feel like you thought it would feel. How many people go out and start their own thing with the goal of, like, man, if I could just replace my W2 salary, and before you know it, there are a few years down the road making four times as much as they ever did before, and they feel trapped. They're working more than they ever did before. They are stressed out of their mind. That person, before they made the jump, if they could see you three, four years in the future making four times the money but having no fun, if they could see your calendar and the number of meetings, the fact that you couldn't get home in time for dinner, that person would say, yeesh, that's what I was trying to get to. That's this thing that's kind of been glorified of, oh, you make all this money and it's like, freedom. Does your calendar look like freedom right now? And this is the hard thing. Getting to the place of plenty and being able to know when enough is enough. Have the really hard conversations that get back more control of your time and send the folks you're no longer a fit for to somebody else. And for some people, it's easy to have these hard conversations. Not easier. But it is easier than it is for others because there's other people who will be stuck here for decades and run themselves into the ground in the name of serving the people who are getting a screaming deal and sending all their friends to you because they want the same screaming deal. To me, that is the worst version of the servant's mindset. That is like self sacrifice. That is sabotage. If you're running a business on the notion of doing more for less, that is not a business strategy. That is just. That's a recipe for disaster. But until we get to that place of plenty, we're just thankful to have it right. Because, I mean, look at this story. Kids leave for school, get divorced, I return to work And I just want to build my thing, and I've done it. I got enough clients to go out on my own. That is amazing. If somebody had told you probably at any point in your life that you'd be running a business that generates 150 grand a year, you'd have been like, that's freaking. That's awesome, man. I'm going to be that person in the future. That's amazing. And so don't ever let you or anybody else discount, like, how rad it is to get there to the place of plenty. But understand when you hit the place of plenty, the game changes. So how do we start walking towards selectivity now? Now that we're there, the first and most important thing to do, and most firms honestly have still not done any version of this exercise, is decide figure out who your A client is. Every client list is made up of A, clients, B clients, C, clients, D clients. Do you even know who your A client is? And oftentimes we don't assess these clients on the right metrics. The most common trap is we are duped by the clients who are good people, but not good clients. These are like the people you're going to bump into at the boat ramp. They are the, the people who are coaching the, the little league team. We kind of get suckered into thinking that good people make good clients, but those are actually two very different things. A good person is not by default a great client. I think of it in terms of are they good people, but also are they a good fit for where we're going and what we're trying to do, AKA am I solving painful problems for them? And do they have the money to pay for solutions for a lot of folks, tax prep, bookkeeping, all that stuff, Not a very painful thing. It may not stand in the way of them making more money or be all that stressful to them. And so they don't value it all that much. Other people, it may super pain them, but they don't have the money to pay what it requires to deliver a good version of that solution. The best clients, they super intensely feel the pains that you solve, but also they have the money to pay for solutions. And it's why you will have clients on your client list who will pay you next to nothing because you always discount their invoice. And they will complain until the end of time. Be like, this is so much money. And you're like, brother, you don't realize how much I just discounted this for you. And you're still complaining. And then at the other end of the client list, you're going to have somebody who pays you top dollar more than anybody else and does so with a bigger smile on their face than anybody else. Why is that? How can those two people coexist in the same universe? It's because not everybody feels the pains we solve to the same level. And so you're a client is someone who is both a good person and a good fit for where you're trying to go, because you're solving some really costly pains for them and can charge them top dollar as a result. Now, similarly, they might be a great fit, but a bad person. I wouldn't work with those folks. You can still have somebody that's a great fit for where you're going, but is like a bad person and someone you just don't want to work with. Those folks I would kick to the curb. But the really common trap here is when you have a good person that's not a great fit for where you're going. Those are the tricky ones. That's where it pays to have referral partners, where you have other firms that you built a relationship with. You get an understanding of how they work. And you know, if you go back to the time in your firm running journey where those clients put food on your table and were the most important thing, and there was probably a time when they were your A client, but they no longer are. There are other firms right now for whom they can be an A client. And don't fool yourself into thinking they're going to get more or better from you than they will from someone else for whom that client is the apple of their eye. Right? So much of the quality of service that you get from an accounting firm boils down to how excited is this person to service you if you call them, are they excited to pick up the phone or not? The clients who are no longer like, in the direction that we're trying to build our firm, we're just not excited about those people anymore. So they are not getting your best. So first things first. We got to figure out maybe for the first time, who is our A client. Who do we want to go after? Understand that great clients never need a discount is a mistake that I made. As you have somebody come in the discovery process and you're like, oh my gosh, this is like exactly the type of person we want to build our firm around. This is so important for the future. Let's give them a discount. They're so good. They're such a good fit that we're actually going to do our work for less. Great clients don't need a discount because their ability to pay you, that is a big part of what makes for being a great client. And it's not to say that your business can't have some sort of service component. But the big trap that we fall into is running this like not pro bono accounting firm, but low bono accounting firm where they're like, they're kind of paying us and you end up stuck in the middle of like doing all this like discounted rate work for people. And that kind of becomes the normal because then they refer their friends who also expect the same sort of discounted work. That's for me, that's not how I want to run my business. I want to run my business pushing into a clients who will pay us top dollar and running a lean client list of folks who will pay us really, really well so that we then have the time and the money and the attention to help the people that actually need help. The people who have nothing to pay for our work. Because usually the folks that are like the low bono clients, honestly they're usually doing fine. Like they are not usually the people most in need. But it can be hard to let those people down and you end up having your whole calendar filled and not having an hour in the day to ever help the people that actually need help. So my myself, I prefer more the barbell approach where I'm going to run a business around the folks that most need us and pay top dollar for us and that'll give us the resources, the time, the attention to go out and really do like meaningful, more, more sort of mission oriented initiatives rather than being mired in the middle with a kind of hard business to run. Hey, real quick, are you tired of having to like duct tape a whole bunch of apps together to run your accounting firm? Of course you are. Would it be nice you if if you had you had what you needed all in one place? Gang, listen up. This is where today's sponsor Financial Sense can make your life a whole lot easier. It's everything you need to run your firm all in one place. But they recently started shipping some really cool workflow stuff. It has a deep integration into the accounting ledger. It'll actually pull all the transactions in so you can do more of your month end review from inside a Financial Sense. And it'll even auto flag a bunch of stuff like big transactions, inconsistent transactions. It's got kind of a whole month end review flow that you now go through from inside a Financial sense. Then you make those changes to the transactions. They all get pushed back to the ledger like magic, bro. So one of the headaches right now in picking accounting tech is you have practice management systems that oversee the work. Then you have workflow tools that do the work. Financial Sense Doing a bit of both. Now they've been a practice management system historically. Now they're getting more into the bookkeeping workflow, which is great news if you're the type of person that doesn't like juggling a whole bunch of tools. Now Financial Sense they'll actually give you a 14 day trial if you use the link down in the show notes. That is the most generous free trial I've actually seen in our space. Absolutely worth kicking the tires on. To learn more, check out that link. Hey, real quick, if you use Microsoft Outlook or Gmail in your accounting firm, pay real close attention to what I'm going to tell you next. This podcast sponsor Missive it is email like you have always wanted. It is a team first approach to managing email. Would you believe me if I told you Microsoft Outlook which came out, I think we worked it out. It was pre middle school for me. Microsoft Outlook it is not the best like email platform for accounting firms. That may come as a shock to you. And when we're spending a huge percentage of our time on email, accountants on average in my polling spend one to two hours ahead day just managing email. It means the tool you use for email is incredibly important. Missive over 500 accounting firms have moved their email to Missive. We did a demo of Missive on my YouTube channel a few months back. People freaking flipped. In fact I've made a social post, a sponsored social post. A couple days later over 50 people opted to hop in on a demo like a little show and tell that we were doing the next week from an accounting firm that spread been running all their email on Misa for the last few years. Some practice management systems will manage your email inbox, but most of them all they do is connect to it. Which is great. So I can see the emails associated with my client records. But that is not a like productive place to be composing and managing email by any stretch of the imagination. Missive it is the inbox tool for teams built from the ground up to make you more productive with this stuff and give you a path to like delegating email work for the first time too. I'm a big fan of the tool. To learn more about Missive, check out that Demo on my YouTube channel. Then head on down to the show notes to learn more. Now one other thought on these A clients is in most firms, your A clients today are actually happy to pay much more than they do right now. We all know who the clients are who don't want to pay what they have to pay now, right? They let you know, they complain. But at the other end of the spectrum you have clients who are very happy to pay you the price that you're charging them right now because the value that they're getting is, is well above the price they're paying right now. But those people you don't hear from, they don't raise their hand and be like, hey, can I pay you some more? And the best way that I found to figure out who these people are because this is very important and a big factor in who should your A client be. The best way that I've found to determine who these folks are is to put multiple prices in front of them. This is normally done in three tier proposals, but this can be done as simply as just a two tier proposal. If you look at what this accountant is doing, they've now hired an assistant and there's going to be a day where you've got to get some of your time back and you don't want all of your clients working directly with you. A very easy way to test this sort of pricing thinking like who's willing to pay more is to put two prices in front of them. For one price they can still work directly with you. For another price, they have to work with your team. They don't get direct access to you or it's somehow limited. The people who are right now getting more value than, than you are charging them for, they will self select into the price that's most representative of the value they're getting. So you will see more of those folks opt into that higher price and that's a great signal for who your A client should be. You already know all the clients on the client list who are the D clients because they complain. So how do we find a signal for who the A clients are, the people who will happily pay us more? The best way I found to do this is by putting multiple prices in front of them and letting them self select. There may be the people that you like on the client listening like, yeah, I want to work around these people. That doesn't necessarily mean though that they're willing to pay you like twice as much. I, I mean at this point I've helped hundreds of accounting firms roll out three tier proposals. For the proposals for the first Time. The biggest surprise they most consistently encounter is they're shocked at how many people opt into the more premium tiers. They're like, I've never had anybody pay me this much money before. It's like two, three times what they were paying me before. How do I. How do I even begin to deliver that much value to them? I would argue that they're paying you that much because you were already delivering them that much value before. They're not like rolling the dice on some bet that you doing more work for them is going to be way more valuable. I think the more likely story here is in the past, you were charging them a number, but the value they were getting from you was way above that number. And for the first time, you gave them an option to get more from you. And they're like, I've already been getting more value, so of course I'm going to opt into the more premium option. This happens. I mean, I've seen it happen across tens. I mean, that's. It's hard to say at the top of my head, if not hundreds of anecdotes across accounting firms, because we all suffer from a degree of this, this issue of, like, there's not that many people that are complaining about rates, so we could probably go higher. You hear from accounting firms that do the big, scary rip off the band aid, huge price increase. They're perpetually shocked at how few people leave. Like, you talk to an accounting firm that will double rates, and they're like, yeah, next to nobody left. And now I'm actually kind of screwed because I thought a bunch of people would leave and I'm over capacity. And that didn't really solve the problem. So know that there's a lot of people on your client list today that will happily pay more. And what's standing between us and the solution to that capacity problem is simply having. Having the gumption to do what we probably already know that we need to do. So first tip here, walk towards selectivity. This is a new thing you're learning to do for the first time when you reach the point of, of plenty, of having too much or plenty to do. The correct solution here is not simply hiring until the end of time. You certainly can go out and hire, but hiring is not a solution to people not paying you as well as you could be paid. Second suggestion here is know that, that you make the rules, that these clients are coming into a universe of your own creation. And it can be whatever you want it to be. And when you have a client list it can be hard and scary to change things because you're like, oh, they don't want to change and they're not going to like having to do things differently and follow a different set of rules. And some of that is real. A lot of that isn't. We actually just think about the folks who complain about everything and they stand in the way of, of us building a better firm. But this whole universe that you're bringing these clients into, you get to make the rules from scratch. And every new client that comes in that has no understanding of what the game used to be, sometimes they're sort of a refreshing reminder that you're like, oh, I can make up whatever rules that I want. I can make it so that every single new client that comes in, they automatically get extended. I could 10x my minimum to where I'm like, no, if I'm going to do your bookkeeping, it has to be a minimum of $2,000 a month. Even if it's 10 transactions, doesn't matter. Clients will choose whether that is worth it to them or not. Brought up the issue of like auto billing and auto pulling your fee every single month that these days that's not a tall ask, but that ought to be a non negotiable rule. You don't want to have to go into people's offices anymore. Got to be able to all be done remotely. You don't want to have to meet with folks in person to do tax returns. Great. These are all rules that you can set where you're like, these are the rules by which I operate. And if that doesn't work for you, awesome. There's plenty of other folks out there that can help you. Because you know what? I got everything I need. And so the last thing I need to do right now is let in more folks who don't want to work the way that I want to work. Last tip here, number three is consider how you can reprogram yourself the way that you think, the way that you approach running your business by surrounding yourself with other people that have built something that you aspire to. And we all aspire to something different. But I find the more accounting firm owners out there that you meet, the more you see this like, beautiful canvas of all the things that are possible. And when you see a lot of these things, they feel out of reach. And you're like, I don't know how I could ever even get there. Whatever that is for you. Maybe it's CFO services, maybe it's niching down the best way to get there is to surround yourself with the people for whom that is normal. You sit in a room with them, you have these conversations with them, and you'll find that very quickly their normal becomes your normal. And you get this entirely different level of confidence in the way that you communicate with your clients about how you work and what it's like coming to work with your firm and where your boundaries are and the confidence that you have to push back on clients when they cross those boundaries. When you are by yourself on an island, you are making it up every single day. When you know other people that do something similar, you have a framework that you can work within because you know what's normal. You actually know way more than the client does about what do other accounting firms do and what's the accounting firm that I want to create. This person's in Southern California. So, like my suggestion to you, we're going to be back with another round of workshops. 20 cities in May and June. One of them is going to be in SoCal. That's all I can say for now. Okay. So think about how can I build connection with other people that run accounting firms? I mean, social media. A lot of smart people hanging out on social media, online communities. I run one, obviously. It's called Realize. RLZ IO is the website. Over 700 accounting firm owners are out there learning from each other, making friendships, whatever your preferred mechanism for doing this is, and the very best one by far is in person. That's why I jump straight to like coming out to a workshop, because the workshops are all local people. So it's not only people that run accounting firms, but it's going to be people that are very local to you that run accounting firms. Last time we ran1 In LA, we had over 80 accounting firms out. And you will meet so many people. Some of them you'll vibe with, some of them you won't. But every one of them will have things that you can learn from. And just having those peer connections helps you build a totally different level of confidence in running your business and trying to get from A to B. But you know what? Good for you getting to where you are right now and for submitting this so that we can have the conversation. Had this person not made this submission, not only could they not have gotten this value, but the 1500-2000 people that will listen to what we're doing right now will also get value from the fact that they submitted this, because if they didn't, we wouldn't be talking about it. And that's why you should do the same. Scurry on down to the Show Notes. There's an intake form there. It'll take 10 or 20 minutes to complete. Tell me about your accounting firm. It's all totally anonymous and you might just kick off an amazing conversation that can help not only you, but a bunch of other folks as well. Gang, thanks for tuning in. You got any advice for this person? Maybe this is a position that you found yourself in once and you can offer some sage wisdom. If you're on the YouTube version of this, drop a comment down below. Thanks for coming and hanging today. I'll catch you in the next one.