570 How To Know If Your Accounting Firm Needs a Coach

Today on the podcast, we are digging into how to know when to pull a coach into your accounting firm. Is this thing, is this a thing that you need? Because let me tell you, they're not cheap. They really aren't. But is it one of those situations where, where you can't afford not to. Also, we're going to dig into a very real accounting proposal that a viewer sent me. I'm going to offer some feedback on how to, how to spruce that proposal up so that that client will say yes to an even bigger number. And today the mailbag is bursting. Digging into a bunch of your questions from. Oh my gosh. Some of the comments on the last podcast about desk upgrades. Some of you people just are maniacs. We're covering questions about, about launching your own firm, about divorcing legacy providers like cch, how to know if you should pull the plug on the implementation of a new app if it's gone a bit sideways, and how to start selling more advisory services. Man, this is just a cornucopia of stuff we're covering today. It's like you just walked into a Sizzler. A Hometown Buffet. Hometown. Is that what it. Hometown Buffet. If you're new here, welcome along to the Jason on Firmcast where we talk all things accounting firms, everything from running them to launching your own to running a better one. This is the podcast. We've also got a YouTube channel that is, that is much more visual in nature. Now, coaches, there's a lot of them, honestly a lot of firm owners that even want to do a bit of coaching on the side. But where does it make sense? Where does it not make sense? Now, my journey, or at least part of my journey was going to an accounting firm just as a, a regular, regular old staff accountant doing tax prep. And I spent almost a decade at that firm before I ultimately bought it. Like bought out several of the outgoing partners. And by the end of my journey there I was, I was completely out of the client work. I was the one person in the 40 person firm that didn't touch any client stuff day to day. So I feel like I've lived the entire evolution of like low man on the totem pole staff person. This was the second accounting firm that I was at clear to owning the firm and not being in the client work at all. And as you can imagine, those are two very different realities. Like you see the business in very different ways. And so much about accounting firm thought leadership boils down to how quickly are you evolving your client list. Like you an accounting firm at the end of the day is it is pretty much who is your client list. Like, that is as good as your accounting firm can be, is how good are the clients. And many accounting firms, that evolution over the course of, say, five years will look very dramatic. Other accounting firms, they will literally take the same clients to their grave. Why is that? Like, why do some folks and some firms evolve that in a way that other firms do not? And I think it boils down to your proximity to the clients, like how close you are to that client relationship. Because evolving that client base comes with a lot of of drama, a lot of stress, a lot of hard conversations. But we also know the opposite end of the spectrum, the bad version of that, where you never have those conversations. That is not a fun business to run either. Right? Repeat after me. Hard decisions, easy life. Easy decisions, hard life. Why didn't you repeat it? I've said that on the podcast so many times now. And so when you are a staff person and, and, and when I say staff in this context, I'm talking about the person who like, works with that client day to day when orders come down from on high about some sort of change that's going to impact this client. For the staff person, that is a really, really big deal. Try jacking up prices on clients and see how much your team likes that. Especially if you're like, hey, sorry, you're going to have to go call your clients and communicate this change to them. Your staff, they're not going to be happy, right? They are the most like closely tied to that client person there because that is such a personal and direct relationship for them. Any sort of change, it that impacts the status quo, that is a very big deal for your staff. But if you go to the, the person that is now working above the business and not doing any of that client work, that person, one could argue, is now out of touch with client relationship and out of touch with what it's like to manage those clients. And you don't understand the context, otherwise you wouldn't be making this big decision, right? Like, you can see those two people having that friction. You've got the one person who is not in the client work and they're like, I'm doing what I have to do for the health of the business. And then you've got the person that manages the client relationship that is like, this is going to be so hard for person XYZ that we're supporting. Like this stands in the, in, you know, against everything that we've ever done for them. And so in situations like that, when you've got the person that's removed from the relationship and the person that's in the thick of the relationship, who's right, like, whose decision do you have to go by? The big boss who's thinking of the business as a whole or the person that's closely tied to that relationship and can't see outside of that. Now this is particularly hard, I would argue, for smaller accounting firms, particularly single owner accounting firms, where, where that, that owner is the face of the business. It's probably who brought all of those clients in and they still have a relationship with all of those clients in a setup like that, that person is effectively the staff person that we're describing. They have no separation from those client relationships. And so it then becomes very hard to like put your business owner hat on and be like, what do we need for the business right now? You can probably think of people who, you know, who have like suffered by that. The fact that they just can't bring themselves to make those hard decisions with the clients because they're so close to those clients and oftentimes will literally run their own business into the ground because they can't make those changes or even in serious cases, run their own health into the ground. Right. And so in situations like that, if you're on the outside and you're coaching that accounting firm, you're going to be like, buddy, like, pull your head up, like you know exactly what you need right now and you're not doing it. But when you're the person, like when the shoe's on the other foot and you have those very close relationships, very, very hard thing to do, right? So again, in a situation where you've got the person who's removed from the client relationships working with the people who manage the client relationships, who is right. And as with most things in life, the answer is both of them to a degree. Like the right answer is, is something in the middle. It's a marriage of the two. Now, I would argue there's also like a third person in today's accounting firm ecosystem that is like the aggregator, like the person trying to buy accounting firms and, and swap them like, like Pokemon cards. The M and A enthusiast who is even more drastically removed from the client relationship. And at that point even the employee relationship, like, you gotta know, the clients aren't being thought of in most of those setups. And unfortunately in many of them also, the employees are not saying all of them, just saying many of them. But like, that's an example of what being even more removed looks like you're very biased to what? About the business as a whole and how the business makes money. Perhaps on the other end of the spectrum, you had the client who was like, I have my problems and I'm only concerned with them. I don't care at all about the business. I think we can all agree the right answer here is, is something in the middle. But we don't all have the luxury of being able to remove ourselves from client work. And this could be for a number of reasons. Maybe inside of your firm you manage some of the client relationships, but not all of them. I would hazard a guess that for you, making hard decisions around pricing changes and all that is much easier to do for other people's clients than it is for your own clients. Right? Because maybe you're on the path that's like the right path or we don't want to rock the boat with the clients that I'm still managing. I mean, the reality is you are closer to those clients than you are the other clients. So it's simply easier to make hard changes to the clients that you're not quite so close to now because we don't always have control over what our proximity is to the client relationship. This is where third parties can be really helpful. This is where pulling a coach in potentially can get you over the hump. Because if you are best buds with every single client that you work with, I don't know that it's possible to have the headspace where you are able to act from a place of self interest. And at the end of the day, you kind of have to. And the mistake that I think so many of us make is we leave home, we go to work and we put the cape on and we're the hero for every one of our clients and the team around us. And they're like, wow, you can do anything. You're amazing. And then you get home at 9pm and the people that pay the price for those heroics are the people at home who by the way, are the ones who actually want to spend time with you. And by the way, on your deathbed are the only ones you're going to be thinking about. This was a, this was actually a really big lesson for me, a really big takeaway in selling an accounting firm. And we all know that like so many of adult relationships are a product of proximity, right? The kid parents that you see at all, the stuff, the co worker that works across from, from you, and they're the ones that you hang out with, with at work. And so they're kind of one of your closer relationships. So many of adult relationships are just a product of proximity. And we know this because as soon as that proximity, like whatever's forcing it ends. A lot of times those relationships, they, they fall by the wayside, even more of them than you may have have hoped. And this was a lesson coming out of running an accounting firm is you build all these relationships and these people will come and work for you and clients will come and engage your firm. You build all these relationships that are all very real, very powerful relationships. But when you sell your accounting firm, what I learned was by and large for a lot of people, I was a means to an end. I was a signature on a paycheck, I was how they got their tax return done, how they got their month end close done. And it's okay to enjoy those people and build relationships with people and get close with them, but that also doesn't mean that those relationships are going to outlast the circumstances that brought you together in the first place. And so now I maintain very few relationships from, from when I ran my accounting firm. And I wouldn't say that's because I'm particularly cold or something like that. Like I think we can, a lot of us can look at that and be like, well, I'm not going to, I wouldn't be that way. All I'm saying is I think we over index for like, oh no, these would all be real relationships. But then when those circumstances remove, are removed, fewer of them end up being real relationships than we think. So to bring this back to putting on the cape for everybody at work, who are we optimizing for in life right now? A bunch of people for whom you are a means to an end or the people who are like your, your ride or die life people, usually the people at home who are the ones that are like, hey, gonna be home for dinner for the first time this week. That is a, a very hard reality to ground yourself in. When you are the hero for everyone that you work with and you have the luxury of the buffer that I had in my accounting from when I wasn't working for the clients directly and I could make those harder decisions and it ultimately wasn't my job to communicate those two, those hard decisions to all of the clients. When you are in a situation where you can't wear both hats, you can't see the balance, you're fundamentally biased one way or the other. I think that is probably the situation where it makes the most sense to pull in a coach. A coach is a great forcing function in a number of ways. Not only to help you see the bigger picture and kind of help you pull your head up, but also there's something about making an investment in a coach that will make it more likely that you will take action. And, like, this is real everywhere in our lives. We're like, man, we've engaged like this interior designer right now, and it's so bloody expensive. Like, just the whole. The design process, the things they want you to buy, where you're like, gosh, that's a. That's a lot more expensive side table than I would have bought myself. And we're in this. This where this thing is happening, and we are continuing to engage with the process and make all these decisions and do all of these things because we're already paying money for the designers and for the process, and we're like, no, like, this is happening. And this might be the most valuable aspect of having a coach is it's like, I'm going to drop 20 grand on this for them to give me this advice and tell me that I knew need to do X, Y, Z. Am I really going to come out of the other side of this and then have to admit I just spent all that money and did nothing. It's almost like that's the reason why you then take action, because you don't then want to have to face that you just spent all this money and got no value out of it. And so then you take action. Like, this is real. Like, people value things according to the amount of money that they spend on it. And so simply spending on the solution oftentimes is what can. Can get us over the hump. Because right now, with no other source of accountability, it's like, well, I could do this six months. I can do this in six years. Like, I know I need to do it. I'll get to it. If you engage a coach, you're like, I'm burning this much money, this much money per month. So next month's got to look better than this month. And I got to get going on this. It's a helpful forcing function from that standpoint as well. So this last fall, we did a. A tour of 13 cities, hosted workshops for over a thousand accounting firms. And I bumped into a lady at one of these events, and she said, this week, I have four new hires starting from this podcast sponsor, cloud account staffing. To be clear, she didn't say in the context of that conversation, this episode's sponsor, she just said cloud accountant staffing. Four people starting at the same. Can you imagine? I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy. But you know what? Cloud accountant staffing makes it possible. Back in my firm, we hired both onshore folks and offshore folks. Try to get the best of both worlds because there's problems to just doing one or the other cloud accountant staffing. They're going to help hold your hand through this stuff. It's actually founded by a former accounting firm owner and so all the questions around what about security? What about it? What about do I have to disclose this to my clients? They can help walk you through all that stuff. And one of the coolest new things I've seen in staffing recently, they launched a portal where you can see all of the candidates they've already pre vetted. And even from that portal you can book an interview. You literally just have to give them your email address and you get access to the portal. You can see the tax talent, the accounting talent, the executive assistants, all these folks they've sourced, they've done like some personality assessments for them. And you can book an interview with these candidates directly from that portal. Super cool. If you're building out the squad for 2026, it's worth giving it a serious thought. That's cloud accountant staffing. Learn more at the link down the show notes. If you do any 1040 work, you know you are about to be deluged with client information. My gosh, 1040 intake. The actual intaking of the documents are going to actually consume up to a third of your team's tax season. And that is where this episode sponsor Sorban. It is a big opportunity to save time on your 1040 work. One of the things we've been hammering on most on this on this podcast for the last two years is the really cool tax workflow developments that are happening. I I probably personally know over 100 firms that are very happy Soroban users. Not an exaggeration. We're getting into busy season. It is not too late. You need to look at the new AI 1040 intake automation solutions. If you haven't yet Sorban, it is at the top of my leaderboards for really good solutions for this. So if you don't have that yet, here's what I want you to do next. Pull over to the side of the road, put the hazards on, get your phone out, go down to the show notes, click the link for Sorban to learn more. Now I've people have told me that I'm unkind to coaches before. I don't have a problem with coaches. What I have a problem with is where people slot coaches in, in the order of priorities of how you are to go out and get help from third parties in your accounting firm. So I, and, and this comes from the mistakes that, that I have made. You get, you know, a recommendation or something like that, you go out and you engage this coach and most of them will come to you with kind of their own frame framework for here's how you do X, Y, Z, and hopefully it's relevant to you, but, but not always right? And so at the end of the day, this is one person's experience, one person's framework, one person's view of the world, and they will apply it to, to your firm. And for sure, some are better than others. But at the end of the day, your coach, it, it's still one person. And it's not always going to work. Like, I wasted a lot of money on coaches where you don't realize until you get way into it. You're like, man, I thought this was kind of a complete framework that was going to help us get over XYZ problems. And you know, you learn about yourself and you learn about what, what parts of it work and what parts of it don't along the way. But I've definitely gotten to the end of some of these engagements and been like, man, I did. I did not get my money worth, my money's worth here. And so my take here has, has frankly always been since I ran an accounting firm is before you go out and you hire a coach, figure out, do you have a peer group, like, do you have a trusted group of other people who do what you do, where you can go out and you can ask questions of them and you've got somebody that you can ping about. You know, that question about your practice management system and maybe that, that personal like family balance question and that question about staffing, like, do you feel like you have people, trusted people you can go out and ask these questions to? Because everybody's navigating the same things right now. Like, every person you see commenting, commenting under every podcast, they are living out some version of this. And honestly, my belief is the most viable thing that I can serve as to you is like a lighthouse to those people. This was a huge takeaway of the live events that we ran last year. We had 14 events in November and December all over the US a bunch of people came out. People are like, cool, great. Getting to see like the live in person version of Jason. But almost across the board, the most positive, most valuable part of the day for folks was when we got people together, because there's so much context and so much information to be. To be shared there when most of our days, I mean, it's crazy. We spend all this time just trying to figure it out ourselves, like, from scratch. In fact, when you talk about accounting conferences, When I first started going out to accounting conferences, what I would consistently hear from people was like, yeah, I like going to one or two conferences a year to kind of keep plugged in with what's new and what's going on in sort of the larger ecosystem. And I was like, okay, yeah, no, okay. I got to go to a couple of conferences a year. But then I had some conversations with people who were just doing either exactly what I was trying to do or something kind of adjacent to it, where I could still pull some wisdom from. From what they were doing. And I realized at these conferences, I'm like, all the answers I'm looking for are already out there. Like, everybody has already done the things that I'm trying to do, and they have, like, all these shortcuts in their brain and in their experience where if I can just get that stuff out of them, it will save me years. Like, I had so many examples of these meandering journeys of the wrong things I was trying to do for years. Where had I just had the right conversation at the right time? Hopefully you've had this before where you're like, holy smokes, that conversation might have just saved me years. So then how can it be the right answer that you wait to have those conversations once or twice a year at an accounting conference, surely that is not the right answer. And that's how I got to ultimately, the importance of, like, I need to build my own peer group so I have folks I can go to. Now, as it pertains to coaching, my take here that I think is different than most is simply that you need to have a peer group before you have a coach, because many of the things that people go to a coach for a peer group can better do for you. Like, who is the right person to ask about what app to use about X, Y, Z, all the real actual users, like, not one of them, but ideally a bunch of them. And it's only once you have, like, a peer group that you can put these things off of to where you then can see what slips through the cracks. And where do I need the support of a coach? So to bring this back to, like, maybe making hard decisions with your clients. You can ask other people about what they did and what worked and what didn't do, but what you don't always feel like you have is permission to just like selfishly talk about yourself and work on your own problems for hours. And that is where pulling in a coach to like help you with implementation and help you navigate more of the nuance could make a bunch of sense. But again, I put the peer group ahead of the coach myself personally. And so then the very next question is, who's a great coach? Who should I go to for coaching? Right? Do I need to tell you the answer to this? Do I really? Do I have to? The right answer for who should I go to for a coach should come from your peers. Who else out here has gone out and got coaching? And what was the experience? What was it good for? Was it not good for Some coaches are going to be great for tax shops, others great for more CFO stuff, more for Accounting Monthly, Close Automation. Some great for US firms, many not great for US firms. The highest quality answers you're going to get can come from your peers. But know that like inside of your own brain, we're always going to have all these biases, right? And our proximity to to our clients might be the biggest bias that is driving the overall health and potential of your accounting firm. Either if you're too close to that client relationship and you don't have any perspective outside of that, or frankly you're too far away from the client relationship and you've maybe lost a bit of touch with what are the clients saying day to day. And like how do we maintain those relationships? Hopefully this didn't just sound like a big advertisement for my community. Realize that is the whole point behind realize it's over 700 accounting firm owners and you can go in there and literally ask any question and get unbelievably high quality answers. In fact, Sammy Mae left a very kind comment on the last podcast. Said if you're considering realize one of the things I always wondered is how active is it? Some communities are quiet filled with lurkers. Realize is active people post answer questions, debate stuff in the comments. But it's also drama free. You have access to advisors in different aspects of your business group coaching sessions. Said I'm just a member who's found it worthwhile. Thank you very much for that testimonial. If I were more responsible we would somehow capture that and put it on the website or something like that. That's the stuff I love seeing is like Tell me a real user who can, like, give me the honest answer about something. Right? So, coaches, I. I really like them. They've got their place. Especially if you need someone to give you perspective if you're either too close or too far away from that client relationship. But now, buddy, we got a proposal to roast. Roast a proposal. It's Roast a proposal. Let's roast. Is this accounting proposal? Don't act like you're not impressed by that transition, okay? This proposal was lovingly submitted by a viewer, slash listener of the podcast. You want to submit a proposal for us to talk through, Email it to me. DM it to me on a social media platform, text it to me. That's what this person did. They text me a screenshot at 1-516-980-4968. Go ahead and pop me in your phone right now if you haven't already. You never know when you're going to need my number again. 1-516-980-4968. That's my number guaranteed. Just guarantee I'll reply when you reach out. This has actually been a fun experiment. I put, like, my. I put a phone number out on social media, and I was, like, announcing the world's first totally free accounting firm coaching platform. And almost a thousand accountants have now reached out there, and I can confidently say that we've responded to maybe half of them, which is more than before. We put the number out and didn't respond to any of them, and we're going to continue getting better. There's actually a really fun, challenging thing for me to build right now is what does it look like to build a support team that can, like, sort of extend the way that I would advise folks sort of beyond myself? Right? Like, we'll never be in a situation where people are pretending to be me across anything that never happens. People just assume I don't, like, manage my own socials or respond to my own emails. I. I've definitely got teams that help with all of this stuff, but if you're getting a response that looks like it's coming from me, it's really coming from me. And a lot of people don't even believe that this me on video, on screen right now is real. This is not AI, this is me, but this is something we're building in. My business right now is like kind of a whole support structure for how do we respond to this stuff at a really high volume. It's something I've always prided myself in doing. I've helped a huge number of people who just shoot me messages and emails and all that stuff. I don't get on live calls. But we want to keep being able to help people in sort of a hands on way totally free. And putting this phone number out has been a fun way of figuring out kind of how to do that at scale. Other fun thing about the phone number, you want to call it just to hear the voicemail message, like my voicemail recording. But also you get a question, leave me a voicemail like 30 seconds or less, like keep it tight. Don't be that person at the live event that has the meandering question or response that never ends, but leave me a voicemail. Then we can pull that voicemail recording into the podcast and that's just, that's just top notch content. Okay, let's look at this proposal. Thank you to the brave soul who submitted it. I'll keep that anonymous as we generally do. Here's what I'm looking at. We got a bronze tier, a silver tier and a gold tier and they are called bronze, silver and gold. But above that we got a couple sense sentences of disclaimer says these packages are built for construction businesses doing $1 million plus in revenue and focused on growth with the support of a true financial partner. If your business is earlier stage or not ready for monthly services, reach out and we'll discuss how we can best support you. We got a red flag here already 15 yard penalty on whoever this was. I can't remember this disclaimer being at the top of your three tiers tells me that these tears got into the hands of, of someone or could potentially get into the hands of someone who has no business getting their hands on your tears. Okay, your tears are giving me tears. The three tears we put in front of a client should feel like something that is bespoke to them for a number of reasons. But if you have to have this disclaimer above it, it means this must be living out in the wild and anybody and their mom can get their hands on it. The risk of putting the full beans and this is pricing and everything on say your website, for example, is the way that we perceive the value of something that is just a package that is not modified for anyone. In fact, this is an example that, that I brought up in our, in our live workshop series of where bundling like this can be problematic. And so this is like bundling where every single package is the same for everyone. You've got this bundle of things that you're going to do for them whether they need it or not. And that's exactly the problem is what we then do is we skim through that list and there could be 30 things on that list that are amazing. And you're like, yeah, man, I need all those things. And then you hit one thing there that you don't need. And you're like, what? I don't need that. I got pay for that. I'm not a sucker. You could see 30 things there that you love, but if you see one that you know you don't need, then what it feels like is, is being wasteful to buy that. And you might actually be totally fine with the overall price. Like this could be, you know, buying home Internet and them forcing you to bundle in like a home phone line or something like that. You may be completely fine with the price of that whole thing, but you know what's going to grind your gears? The fact that you still feel like you're paying for something that you don't need. Need. This is the trouble with selling boilerplate stuff is the person on the other side of that, they see the things that they don't need. And then this is made way worse by the fact that we're like putting all these complicated things on there. But when the person sees something they don't need, they're going to be like, well, that's like a one size fits all thing. If I go with this shop, I will be wasting money. Truly, that is what people think when they see that is that they will be wasting money. If you can't tailor that plan to exclude the things they don't think they need, whether they're all right with the price or not, it is a question of are they going to feel like the sucker? Are they going to feel like they're paying for something that they don't need? And so your three tiers, while we can talk about what we do in kind of more broad brushstrokes out publicly, there's no world where three tiers and three prices should end up in front of someone who is not a person that you like at least tailored that thing a bit for. But like, you should have sent that directly to them. It should not get into anybody else's hands. Look at that. We haven't even gotten into the details of the proposals and we've already ripped them a new one. That's literally the segment as roasted proposal. Okay, bronze tier. I'm just going to read through this so you can kind of get the vibes. Bronze starts at eighteen hundred dollars a month. I'm not going to offer any commentary on like absolute price because it kind of doesn't matter. There's always going to be a firm with a bigger fee. Always going to be a firm with a smaller fee. Honestly, doesn't matter what your fees are right now. All matters is your next fees. Like how do we keep the fees trending in the right direction? There's no such thing as average fees. You're not trying to run an average firm. So I, I've got, I'm going to offer no commentary on like absolute cost for things. Bronze starts at eighteen hundred dollars a month. Got a little block of text under that. You get clean, reliable books, clear job profitability insight and tax compliance handled correctly. So you're no longer guessing where the business stands. There is an M dash in the middle of that. Just the perception right now with M dashes, as if there is an EM dash. It was written by AI is an incorrect perception because M dash is worth thing before AI. But right now, just remove any EM dashes from your writing. Below that you've got what's included in a list of bullet points. You got monthly bookkeeping and reconciled financial statements. You got job costing and profitability reviews, guidance on quarterly estimated tax payments, business tax return, individual tax return preparation of Contractor 1099 up to 10, an annual financial review meeting with a named person. Interestingly, I'll read you the silver and then at that point I think you kind of have the gist of it. Silver starts at 2,500amonth. You get proactive guidance, visibility into cash flow and the ability to plan ahead instead of reacting as the business grows. What's included? Everything in bronze, plus quarterly strategy calls, ongoing tax planning, payroll oversight, work in progress, schedule management, business structure analysis and optimization, financial analysis with key metric tracking, cash flow forecasting, detailed scenario planning and decision support. When you hear that fellow accountant, when you hear those bullet points, I can. You probably feel the same way that I do. About 50% of them, maybe a third of them. You're like, sounds great. Not totally sure exactly what that is. And if you and I don't know the difference between a financial analysis with key metric tracking and a detailed scenario planning and decision support. If you and I don't even know the difference of what those things are, then God forbid, the construction constructioneer, the construction business owner who comes along and sees this, and this is maybe the biggest thing inflicting our accounting proposal proposals today, is that when we write them, we are speaking accountant. We are not speaking client. We are speaking accountant. You're probably doing the same thing on your website too. If you wrote the copy, I can practically, practically guarantee that you are. We are writing things in accountants in the way that we would describe them rather than in the way that clients come to us and describe them. And the job of the website or of a proposal at the end of the day is to communicate something to the recipient. It's not about what you want to say, it's about what they're going to hear. And I mean, after four years of marriage counseling, I think I'm finally getting my head around this. It really doesn't matter how you say it. It matters how it is heard. Okay. Save you, save you a lot of money and heartache over that. So everything here, all the bullet points, they sound impressive to us. There are things that we think are cool. Honestly. Our clients though, they've got a totally different set of concerns and, and things they think are cool and language they would use to describe what we do for them. In fact, the best way to like translate this not into accountants, but in this case translate it into construction business owner. This. Is there something besides construction business owner, like a different way to call that? I feel like I'm missing something. Our head of media who's not an accountant, one time he. What is. What did he put on a. A title for a short form video. It was like calling all accounting businesses or like it was something where it was like oh brother. Listen, nobody in the game would ever call it what you just called it. I don't know Construction business owners call themselves. But I can guarantee they don't use the words that we're using in the bullet points here. 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 if you had you had what you needed all in one place? Gang, listen up. 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 work workflow stuff. It has a deep integration into the accounting ledger. Will 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, 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 I 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 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 because 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 Verdo down at the link in the show notes. So a lot of proposal optimization needs to. Needs to come back to how do we keep this as simple as possible, but also frame what we do through the lens of how they make money making people more money. It is the infinite game. There is no ceiling on what you can charge somebody when you're making them more money. Because if I offer you $2 in exchange for you paying me $1, you're paying me for 50% of the value. That's like, that's, that's a lot on the one hand. On the other hand, if I will give you $2 trillion in exchange for you giving me $1 trillion, you'll happily take that deal. So when we are making people more money, there's no ceiling on what we can charge them. And I wouldn't say that this proposal really frames what they do this way. Like, why does decision, scenario planning and, and so, like, why does detailed scenario planning and decision support help them make more money? Like, is there a more specific way we can frame that more directly to profit? Like, ensure that we are making money on, on every single project by this type of tracking or something like that. Stop projects before they go over budget. Like, how do we get this a little back a little bit closer to what we're doing to support them so that the business is making? Then when you put numbers in front of them and they're thinking about cost, they can think back to one situation where what you're describing went sideways and it costs way more than what we're saying we're going to charge them. That's what we're trying to do and how we communicate what's included in these proposals. Now, the other main objection I have to this is that each of the bullet points in the proposals describing what you're going to do for them are around what I would describe as the scope of the work that you're going to do rather than the level of access they have to you or members of your team, you will consistently get this response back from clients. When you send them big, complex proposals that are written in accountant. My experience, most likely what they come back with is, okay, but can I call you? How long is it going to take you to get back to me? Can I Text you when these are the questions that we get back from clients. This is stuff that needs to be reflected in the proposal. And this is actually my take on the best way to do three tier proposals, which, which is different than how I've seen just about anybody in the accounting space advise on this. I actually think your bronze, silver and gold, the work that you do across all three tiers should be the same across all three. Because who knows better than you do what that person needs at this stage in their business? When, when a client reads through this or prospect reads through this, they don't know if they need payroll oversight, they don't know if they need financial analysis with key metric tracking. They don't know if they need an annual financial review meeting with this person. They've never had that stuff before. You've done it with a whole bunch of people who's more suited than you to be able to say, here's actually exactly what you need at this stage. Here's the most lean version of what you'll get the most ROI for. Like, you are best positioned to make that recommendation. In fact, as soon as I put something on a proposal that makes it clear that I'm not going to make that decision and I'm going to make you make that decision, the client, at that point, I'm just going to think that you're just trying to sell me as much as I'll buy. Honestly, like, as soon as we signal that, oh, there's actually different levels of how much I can help you, then very quickly, I would argue in the client size, it's gone from, they're going to, like, no longer they're going to tell me what I need and it's now just about they're going to sell me as much as I'm willing to buy. And so my take here is I'm going to sell them the same work on bronze, silver and gold, the same destination. What's changing from bronze, silver and gold is how we get there is, are they doing it with me? Are they doing it with my team? Are they doing it with a 24 hour response time or a week's long response time? Can they text me or do they have to email us? And it goes into a queue. Again, same destination on all three plans. What we're selling is different delivery, we're selling coach, we're selling business class, we're selling first class. And the great news here is, is we don't need to do more work. What we need is to get your time back. The time you're spending on clients calling you and emailing you and all that. And you're like, geez, Louise, like, I have given myself away and now I never have time to do the work. That's because we've only scoped the work. We haven't scoped you. When I look at this proposal, all three tiers show increasing amounts of work, but they don't say anything about your availability. They don't answer the question of, can I email you? Can I text you? What's the response time? That ought to be the difference from bronze to silver to Gold. Now, how they price these packages is exactly how I would do it. At Bronze, they're saying 1800amonth. Silver, they're saying 2500amonth. Gold, they're saying 4500amonth. That's how I like to do it. If you think about those three prices, 1800, 2500, 4500. If the scope is like an increasing amount from tier to tier that is the same, then when you hear 1800, 2500, 4500, it feels like 2500 is the deal. Right? And again, when a client's looking at these three options, they're thinking, how do I get the most value from these choices? I don't want to be the sucker. I want to choose the one that is the best deal. And so this pricing is steering them towards the middle option. By the way, you're still going to be surprised how many people choose the most premium option, but that's absolutely how I would, how I would do the pricing spread here. Now, they've named the packages Bronze, Silver and Gold. I think that's a missed opportunity. I think you name the packages something that will drive some sort of association with the person's identity. We buy based on our identity and who we think we are. And the buying decisions that we make align with sort of that self identity. So for Bronze, what I always recommend is name it something that will hurt, like Starter or the minimum or something like that. If you got this big ambitious person that's really going places, they're not going to opt into a plan that's called training wheels. Similarly, on that gold plan, make it something premium. Make it, make it vip, make it President's Club, make it Direct access, something like that. Where when that person makes buying decisions in other contexts where they are a VIP or something like that, when they see the VIP path with you, they'll be like, okay, that, that's the one for me. That's who I am. So I will choose this option. The risk here is if we don't actually show people a VIP path, and most commonly accountants don't do this because we do not make the VIP purchase ourselves. Like you are the type of person you're flying. I'm not saying everybody is like this, but many accountants are. If you're the person who's going to buy the Southwest flight because it's, it's just great value and you don't mind standing in the back of the airplane, not even having a seat when they just, you know, put some straw down on the ground. If you don't mind that, you won't attract, you won't retain, quote, unquote, first class clients, people who will make buying decisions and happily pay more because they think that sort of aligns with their identity. You get a person that only ever flies first class, you try to put them on a Southwest flight, you're about to see a just total meltdown, kicking and screaming, flopping around on the floor. This person is like, this is not, this isn't the airline for me. I fly first class. And when one of those people comes along and they look at your offerings and they don't see an option that is clearly the first class option, what are they going to say? They're going to say, this isn't an accounting firm for first class people. Now there's aspects of this that I think a lot of us probably object to. And we're like, well, I'm not first class person, I'm blue collar, working class. This and that. That's, that's fine. The tricky thing here is that VIP path really, when it comes to the doing of the work, it's not that much more work. They've got a little more access to you, which sometimes they will use and sometimes they won't. But that VIP work, it is the most profitable work. Like airlines, they make the bulk of their profit on first class. That is the best way to set up an accounting firm right now is not always selling more work and always selling more of your hours in exchange for more money until the end of time. That is a soul sucking business to run. The bigger opportunity here is building out the premium service delivery that people will pay 2.5x for. And that project's as profitable as, you know, 6 of your legacy projects. Meanwhile, the underlying work is the same. It's the availability, it's the service delivery that feels more premium. And if we zoom out and we think about what do we take fulfillment from doing? You know, when, when someone explain the idea of an accounting firm to you, and you're like, yeah, no, that does sound like an appealing sort of business to run. I would argue that the version that most people got excited about was the version where they're actually going deep with a pretty small number of clients. But as you grow over time, before you know it, you find yourself in a situation where you're saying yes to more and more people. And what that business becomes is a volume accounting firm where the first time a client raises their hand or calls you or sends you an email, you're like, would you just leave me alone? Don't you know how busy I am right now? Like, stop asking me how it's going. You're keeping me from getting the work done. All of a sudden you're serving as many people as you possibly can at a, at a just razor thin level of depth. Most of us, I would argue, would rather do the former, serve a fewer number of people in a deeper way. The path to doing that is premium service delivery is putting a proposal in front of clients, giving them the option to opt into the more premium path that is for you, much more profitable. And in exchange having to do the do the hard thing where when somebody says yes to this, you commit to saying like, okay, we can now cut five of these other projects and give that time and attention to the client to actually deliver on that goal level service, to actually be able to pick up the phone when they call. You can do that. And there are people who are more than happy to, to pay for that privilege, whether they use it or not. Only other note I had on this proposal is, I think it's important when you present the different options that visually a client can read from left to right to see what they get on each of those tiers. Like what this one does, which many do, is you have bronze and it's a list of things. And then the first bullet point in silver is everything in bronze. And then it's a new list just alongside the bronze list. And then you get to gold and it's everything in silver plus and it's a new list. The better thing to do, I think here is you have a single feature or a single service, and then you see that horizontally across all three. And so, you know, like live meetings is one item here. On one tier they have an annual, one tier they happen quarterly, one tier they have happened monthly. I want to see those calls as a single item. And then when you scan from left to right, you can see the progression on bronze from annual to Silver you get quarterly to gold you get monthly. Like all the things that you're getting, I want you to be able to see across from left to right. Here's incrementally what you get on each tier. If you're looking for a visual analogy, think of the popcorn buckets that are stuck up on a wall in a movie theater. You've got small, medium, and large. They're each visually getting bigger. That's kind of what I'm trying to achieve with how I present my services, being able to visually scan from left to right to see how much more I'm getting on gold than I'm getting on bronze. Okay, enough on this proposal. Thanks for sending it in. If you've got something similar, shoot me a text, man. Send it to me and you just might get yourself torn to shreds. Like we did this brave soul today. But hang on. Ding dong, did you hear that males here? Mailbag. Mailbag. This segment is called maybe. Okay, getting into the mailbag. Thank you for your questions. How do you get me questions all the ways that I just told you? Email me DM me. Drop a comment on the YouTube version of the podcast. We got to start with some of the comments on the last podcast. Last podcast was called the three Best Desk Upgrades for Accountants. That's a terrible name. Did somebody make an error? I wouldn't have called it that. The three Best Desk Upgrades, I would have said probably desk setup upgrades. Somebody's getting fired. Anyways, the comments around things you did in your desktop setups here are just madness. Amanda Gavalier My laptop is on a stack of books to raise it. Lol. Amanda, Listen, you're about to spend decades of your life sitting in a chair. You are more than a stack of books under your laptop. I actually went through various different laptop setups. What I ended up with is actually like a vertical holder where I close my laptop and I just slot it vertically into this thing and then I plug a USB cord into it and then the monitors and the keyboards and all that stuff come to life. Otherwise. Other alternative for laptop setup, if you got these stands that'll like hold your laptop open but like elevate them so they're at the same level of your monitor and then that laptop screen kind of becomes another monitor. The reason that I ultimately rolled with like a closed laptop in my dock is I didn't want to have a humongous laptop screen that was useful in a desk setup. Like the biggest laptops you get right now have like a 16 inch screen right and that is a humongous laptop. Requires a big old backpack to carry it around, but then a 16 inch monitor, please. You try to use a 16 inch monitor at an accounting firm these days, you get beat up, as you should. So that's, that's why I ended up with a closed laptop dock setup. By the way, thank you for the feedback on this new format with kind of the three sections. I think for now, we're going to run the podcast this way. The first chunk is like something I'm excited about, something I want to talk through. Second chunk is like roasting something, either a firm's financial statements or proposals, something like this. Then the third chunk, we get into the mailbag, which is kind of a fun, more interactive part of it. But keep that feedback coming. Fireland said, I pace while I'm working anyway, so having a desk treadmill would be great. It would help very much so with my efficiency, I don't know what that means. Unless right now you're pacing away from your keyboard and you can't reach it, so you can't keep typing then. Yeah, if you got a treadmill under your feet, then all the keyboard, the mouse, it all stays within my arm's reach. Josh Finance. I don't know if I'm getting punked. Says favorite desk upgrade. After trying a lot of different chairs, from cheap to expensive, I ended up settling on a padded piano bench. Has significantly helped with arm slash back pain. Josh, I don't know what to tell you, man. Besides, you haven't looked at enough different chairs yet. Chairs. How deep should we go on chairs? Oh, we had another comment here on chairs. Paul Deleo. He says, The Herman Miller Aeron chair, I paid $800 for it in 1999. One of the best investments of my life. He said I could resell that for 500 bucks after nearly three decades of use. I said yes. The Aeron is the forever stamp of chairs sitting in one as we speak. I was actually, when I left that comment, Josh, you just got to upgrade your chair game, man. Was super triggered when I saw the piano bench thing. Unlike the chair tier list, you've got church pew down at like F. And I feel like piano benches just one little baby step above that. This has too much of the granola energy of the person sitting on a yoga ball at work for me. Josh, Nick the gardener said, what about connecting your computer to a projector or a tv? And Nick's the guy in the office who says, I see you have five monitors. Why don't you have six. Nick, I don't. I have this. Not connected to a TV or a projector because my problem isn't how big the monitor is. Let me tell you, if I'm going to do some gaming. Now we're talking. Okay, Run a little split screen out of your office. I can get behind that. But this is just the most accountant comment Nick is okay, I've got 18 monitors in front of me, but this isn't enough. Now I need a television. You just. You don't. I will stand my ground on this. Beyond two large monitors, the additional monitors are just there to distract you. They've got your Microsoft Outlook, they've got Twitter. They might have this podcast. In that case, I'll allow it. And if you're a big business owner, if you're not doing client work, one monitor. I'll meet you out back. I'm serious about this one. People actually doing the work they need two monitors because unfortunately a lot of accounting is still putting the stuff from app and App B. I get all that. But if you're not doing the work, having less screen real estate really can stop your. You're getting distracted. Thank you for the comments. You want to continue to fight me? Drop a comment down below. Jess Cheesy said long hair. Don't care. Thank you. Thank you for noticing. One of these days I'm going to turn around in my chair and everyone's going to see that I've got a rat tail. Just a small one that runs all the way to the small of my back. People came to my live events last year. They saw it. That's not true. We had it tucked into my shirt for most of it, but it got loose a couple times. Hey, if you've got any clients that have to do like ugly project tracking or have any degree of inventory management or big ugly invoices like the type you see from construction companies that are a mile along and have all this item detail, then my brother this episode Sponsor Makers Hub it is for you. Even if you don't do the accounting is a big one to share with your client. Because truly the area of accounting that has been most turned on its head by AI is accounts payable. And it's not even close. We had some big meaty bill pay engagements we did with clients where I truly could have automated 80% of what we were doing. With Maker's Hub, the extraction quality is so far beyond what OCR could ever do. And because it can now pull like every little fiddly detail from the invoice in A totally automated way. Like, like, by the way, we, I think we're actually very close to fully automated extraction, which people have been saying for over a decade, you don't have to review the bills anymore. It's like, really? Because my job is to do the bills and if there's an extra zero that slips in there, I'm going to lose my job. Feels like we're actually getting, getting close to fully automated extraction. But because it can pull all those details really well, you can then build all sorts of automated workflows on top of that for like really complex approvals. And we're talking more than just like pull the date and the amount from the invoice. We're talking about every single little fiddly detail in the item, like itemized list. This is crazy Makers Hub. We did some examples on a demo on YouTube where it was even pulling handwritten text at your crazy stuff. Even if this is not something you're doing for your clients, if you have clients that are doing gnarly billing and inventory management, all this stuff, Maker's Hub. A lot of people that are raving fans of it because it just takes the level. This stuff can be automated like just to another level. How many times did I just say level? Okay, you know what to do next. Learn more down at the link in the show notes. If you got a client you want to share this with, I would say either send them the landing page or send them one of the demo we've done on my YouTube channel and in like seven minutes they can get a sense of what it is. That's it. That's the ad read. 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 a 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 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's been running all their email on Mista 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 it's 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. Okay. Proper Mailbag these are questions submitted to me across various channels. Who can say where? First one Looking to move away from the Thompson Reuters professional suite and reviewing what combination of software will serve us best for our current and future goals. Okay, if you are honestly like most US firms and you're just on a super old school tech stack by kind of the legacy crop of folks from cch, Thompson Roadies, all that the MO like single most important biggest impact tool you could change, it's probably going to be your practice management system, which is kind of like the spine of the accounting firm. It's where everything else should connect and you you really want as much of your firm as possible being run through a practice management system these days. The problem is is it's also the biggest and hardest thing to roll out. And so if you're at an accounting firm where the technology has not changed since the Reagan era, jumping straight into like the biggest, hardest thing to change, like you're absolutely going to pull a muscle. It's a very hard thing to do to jump straight into the practice management system. So oftentimes the easier win is to go with like a new workflow tool that's much easier to roll out. So not the practice management system which is your tasks and your in your time and billing and your client portal and all these things. And it's like, oh, now I got to get the client to log in the portal and do all these different things. Oftentimes the easier place to start is just with a standalone workflow solution. A good tax example is, you know, something to automate 1040 intakes. Probably the best place to start. The current leaders in My app recommendations are Sorban Stanford Tax and Trusts. By the way just added over 60 apps to my app recommendations. You'll see them linked in the show notes of every episode. But it is the at least for us accounting firms, it is the biggest resource app database out there for accounting firms. So look for a workflow tool either for 1040 intake automation if you're a tax shop. If you are doing bookkeeping, look at month end close automation. There's some really cool tools that sit above the the accounting ledger and help you to manage all the steps of the month end close. I would say go look at my app recommendations. There's a whole tab like a who section of month end close automation platforms going like if you're rolling out tech in a legacy firm, starting with a workflow solution is probably a better place to start. So it feels like everybody gotta win and they're like, okay, there actually is some new stuff we should probably lean into. Then you go to the practice management system. But to just cannonball straight into the practice management system is going to be asking a lot of the team. Next question. Do you have a web page that lists all of your paid and free materials in one place? I'm in the process of starting a tax and accounting practice and I'd love to explore more of the guidance you provide. Great news. I really charge for anything. That's not true. The only thing we charge for is realize my Online community is 180 bucks a month. That's probably going to be going up very soon. Otherwise everything within the Jason verse it is free. We do need to get more organized around like the deep dive resources. It's actually something we're talking about with putting out this phone number that anybody can text is we're getting a lot of the same recurring themes. How do I market my accounting firm? How do I get my first clients? How do I improve our workflow? Sort of all these, all these different things and similar to how you ought to like be drafting blog posts around your most common client questions. I need to do a better job of building really valuable resources around kind of the most common things folks get stuck on. Get the app database for text selection. I feel like that's a good deep resource, but we need to do a better job of like having these sort of tent pole, higher effort, really high quality resources around the most common questions that I get. Because when they come to the podcast and they see 600 episodes they're like where do I begin? In fact, I get that question a lot in person. They're like, I just, I recently found your podcast, but I'm not going to listen to all 600 episodes. What do I listen to? And yeah, I don't have a good answer for that. I really don't. I think what I say is, like, look at the titles and find something that feels relevant to you. But hey, man, like, doesn't matter where you catch, where you catch the wave. You're part of the crew now. Climb aboard. Enjoy the vibes. I learned a lot from the proposal videos. My only confusion is, are all services for one client covered by one proposal? Great question. If they have three businesses like an S Corp, a schedule E, a schedule C, is that all one proposal? Lovely question. And is an unfortunate headache with like, almost all the clients we serve have like multiple quote unquote clients within them, right? Like their personal tax return, their business return, all that. Best practice here and how we think about presenting something to the client is to price the relationship, the entirety of what you do for that client. Because the reality is, client's going to call you with three questions about the business. One question about little Timmy's boil that he just had removed and whether it's deductible, and one question about a rental. And what you're not going to do is get through the business questions and then be like, oh, so sorry you don't have the adequate support plan to discuss a little Timmy's boil. You're gonna have to email me about that one instead of call me about that one. And the way that we actually serve clients, like, you got to roll all that stuff up together. The problem is then if I send a single proposal to my client and then they accept it and wire up a payment method, the invoicing can kind of be a nightmare. Now, I say that, but at the end of the day, what I don't want you to do is then build all of your proposals in whatever way is going to map best back to the invoice. Like, we gotta think client experience first. We gotta think getting paid first. Like what? Like what is the process that yields the biggest number on the back end then? Because all of this can't be perfectly automated. It just means that we need a system and a human to apply and follow the system. I can tell you right now there is no good way to do this with the tools that are out there. Roll up a bunch of different proposals into one experience. In fact, I may not even recommend that. Like, even if that were possible, would you really want to show the pricing of. Well, here's how much is attributable to your schedule C and here's how much is attributable to your big business versus your individual tax return. Like that's actually getting closer to menu based pricing, which I think we can, most of us can agree. We actually don't want to display that much detail. So I can tell you what I would do. What I did in my firm was one of two things. I either presented a single unified proposal for all of those things and I said, here's everything we're going to do for you. Accept it and connect a payment method. And that was usually the business account. And then our on our end, like if we were doing the accounting, we would split out, you know, the non business portion and all that. And then internally for us and how our firm invoiced, we would then on our end split out the invoicing. So that's one way that you can do it. That's the cleanest for the client and just creates a little more operational stuff for you. The other thing that you can do is present the proposal in something outside of a proposal platform or use the proposal platform and just don't have them set up a payment method there and then individually connect the payments for each of those entities. We would do that sometimes also where I'd present the proposal like live or in a slide deck or something like that. And then I would say, okay, you just signed off on these seven things, run through and accept these six proposals for me real quick. And that will set up the payments for each of the entities. And like we would do this for them. So in most cases we're doing the accounting for all these different companies. And so we're saying like this is the right company account to be paying this proposal portion, this is the right company account for this portion and all that. And so then we just ask the client to go through and like accept those six proposals. Both of those kind of suck. But that's where we're at. And at the end of the day there's nothing more important than what is this person agreeing to pay me for the next 12 months. Like that's the most important screen the client will see from you all year. If there's anywhere that is worth putting in more effort, it is in the process that brings them to saying yes to a number to you. Like there's nothing more important than that. Question from Tim Krause for the three tier proposals, do we have a default tier? For example, whatever they were on last year that we assigned to Them if they don't respond to either of the other two options. Yeah, Tim, normally I'd say here is your bronze, especially the first time you're rolling out three tier proposals. Your bronze is basically Sally. So whatever you did for them last year with a price bump, and this is helpful for somebody seeing a three tier proposal for the first time. Normally your clients are going to be very overwhelmed by your proposals because they are way too long and complex and written in accountant. And then when we put three options in front of them, they're like, no idea, brother. And this is where you see, sometimes the first time folks roll out three tier proposals, you can see that the client looked at it and then just never decided the solution for this. It's simpler proposals, it's also setting deadlines. It's also making it clear they actually have to decide within a certain time frame. But the question here is, do you have an option that they default into? You could, like, the answer is you could like, bronze in the way that I normally set it up is what they had last year. And you could make a rule that at a certain deadline, if they haven't responded, they're going to be automatically opted into that bronze option. But at the end of the day, like, we still have to get an engagement letter signed. Like, they still have to opt in. Here's the scope of what we want you to do for us. And so you could fall back to this and have it default to this if they don't respond. I would say the better thing to do here is for the people that don't respond. We just got to put in the legwork of like, hey, you need to respond. Let's go through this. Like, I can help you review this if you have any questions. And recognize that by and large, most of this legwork is like a year one thing. Like the first time you make that transition, for sure, budget the time. Don't put it all on yourself to where you're the only one that can do this. So, like, the best answer here is let's take the time to, to make sure people understand this and proactively choose. If you run out of time or you don't have any other options, then yes, it could make sense to have like something they fall back to. Next up, my firm needs young, talented preparers willing and ready to learn and grow. That's it. That's the whole question. Yeah, get in line, bro. Everybody does. I mean, that's the state of the accounting profession right now is there's just not enough people Coming into it to get all the work done. Right now it's really being propped up by Offshore, which I wouldn't say is the worst thing. Like offshore is problematic when that's the only way that you hire as a way of augmenting your onshore. That's what I did. Like, I think the two go hand in hand when you can kind of use the, Utilize the best of both worlds. But yeah, there just aren't enough people coming into the profession right now. That being said, it is a huge pool that you're fishing in. Still a very, very big pool. And if you look at how average most accounting firms are, what would it take for you to stand out? Recently on the YouTube channel, we did a interview with Katie Thomas, who runs kind of one of the leading marketing agencies for accounting firms. And one of the things she brought up is accountants always have 100 reasons not to market and not to prioritize it. But maybe the biggest impact they're seeing on a lot of the firms they work with is how they have no open positions. Like, when they're out there talking about their firm and what they do, potential hires come and find them. And so at a certain point, like if you are running into staffing issues and you can't find the right people, sometimes it takes asking the hard question. One, why would somebody want to come and work for us? Like, we all know what the vanilla accounting firm website looks like, where it's like, we give peace of mind and here's 100 services that we do. And from the client's perspective, it's like, I don't know how to tell you, being different than literally anybody else. Our careers page what we have to offer for people who work for us. Sometimes we kind of suffer from the same issue. Right? And the strategy that doesn't work is, well, we're a great place to work. Nobody knows that until they get in the doors. Like, if that's actually true, then what are you doing to get out there and tell the story of what a great place to work you are? If everybody there is offline and you are professionally invisible, like most accountants are these days, then your surface area, for people even discovering you, it's. It's kind of next to nothing. Right. I still remember when I, I ran a, it was a year and a half ago. We tried to do sort of a staffing thing where accountants that came in and consumed the content. We would sort of pair them with accounting firms in the audience and so you could hire like, like minded people that were tuning into the podcast into your accounting firm that just seemed like the perfect fit. You've actually got a lot of really smart, really high level accountants who hear the stuff we're talking about and they're like, dang. Going to work for modern accounting firm. Sounds sick, but I can tell you the firm I work for right now, it ain't that. And so we could take those people, pluck them out of their old legacy firms and put them into cool modern firms. And these were generally like pretty high level, like managers, supervisor, ambitious types of folks. Most accounting firms, like, they're not plugged into any sort of thought leadership or networking or anything like that. They're kind of living offline, honestly, just heads down and work going day by day. When you're, when you're that heads down, you just, you're not out there where anybody will ever discover what you're doing. So step one is just to be out there and be visible and actually do something cool and notable and be great for a specific type of person to come to work for you in the same way that you can be great for a specific type of client to come to work for you. I'm just starting out my own firm and all of my experiences in bookkeeping. How can I talk to clients about tax and bookkeeping in a way that they'll trust me to use them as my guinea pigs as I'm figuring out my business? It's a huge sticking point. I don't know if the, I don't know if the question there is that you're using them as tax guinea pigs or just more generally guinea pigs, because you don't have that many clients yet. I mean, the big thing I would push here is, is just understanding that perception is reality and that even big firms deal with the same thing. Like, they look up to the bigger firms and they're like, oh, our clients don't perceive a fake, perceive us as those even bigger firms. What do we do? Like, there's always something bigger. Your client's understanding of what you do really comes down to what is the world that you're creating for them. Like, when they come in, are you like, hey, yeah, we're just getting started. Just have our, our kind of first few clients and we've got this promo, like, early client discount. Is that the tone that we're setting straight out of the gate, or are we like, yep, like we're experts. Here's who we work with. And you fall into that bucket. Let's talk about it. Like, these days, they kind of don't need to know. I definitely wouldn't be volunteering. Like, hey, do you want to be my guinea pig? And I will, I will just try stuff on your business as we figure this out together. Some people, what they'll do is they will frame their solo accounting firm as like, hey, are you tired of getting passed around in your accounting firm? I'm the only one that works here. Wouldn't that sound nice? Almost like a fractional accountant coming to work just for you. That can be appealing in some situations. It's kind of a hard precedent to set though, where you may not necessarily want that to always be the case. As soon as you start hiring people, then it's like, well, that offer doesn't really work anymore. What I'm reading in this question is a limitation that is between your ears, not a limitation that the right clients for you are going to be blocked by. I think we're probably struggling with like, who, how am I going to do this? When how we need to present ourselves to clients is like, yep, we can help you. We got this figured out now. This balancing act there where it's like, don't commit to stuff you don't know how to do. Like wading into tax with no support structure that, like, that's a pretty tricky thing. No one just like starts doing tax one day unless you're starting at a really, really simple point, like very basic 1040. I would say that the biggest thing here is confidence. And I mean this is the answer for, for a lot of my questions. But how do you build more confidence? Surround yourself with people that are doing the same thing. Logan Graff runs a community called Counter. That's a bunch of people that are starting accounting firms. Surround yourself with 150 other people that are starting accounting firms and you will real quick learn how to cut through. Like, what's the norm and what is the best practice even for somebody who's just starting out. But you do that on your own, like you do that solo, like that can kind of be a lonely road. And you don't even know when a client tells me this, like, is that reasonable or not? Like, that's just, that's a hard way to go about building a business. Few more here. We want to divorce cch. It seems so daunting. Is it worth it? Yes. From my lips to your ears, yes. I would say the bigger thing that you learn going away from legacy software providers is it actually opens up a whole world to you of like, oh, I don't only have to buy stuff from this vendor. There's just a vast rainbow of other cool things over here that are totally legit, that really smart other firms have been using for like five plus years. Like when we get super stuck on, you know, a way of selling a service or a specific tool or any of these things. And Americans are great about doing this. With QuickBooks, for example, we look at all the other alternatives and we're like, nah, you can't actually run a firm doing that. It's like, well then look at all those other firms who are doing that and, and having success. How is it that they're doing that? It's just, it's something that we haven't learned, something we haven't figured out how to do for ourselves yet. Americans are like, no, you have to use QuickBooks. And it's like, oh really? Like what is the rest of the world use for their accounting ledger? There are other platforms that are plenty good. We just haven't figured out how to, how to make use of that stuff yet. So yes, divorce cch. Not because the first other tool you pick is going to be perfect, but because it'll just open you up to a totally different way of running your firm. Next question. I see you recommending, I'm going to say redacted a specific tool a lot. We're mid implementation and I guess there's a lot you don't know. I feel we are likely to move off the software after whatever the bare minimum is. It's very underdone in virtually all areas which they hide during sales and early implementation. Even their core workflow piece has a lot of flaws. I think you need to be more nuanced in your recommendations here. Accountants are funny, man. They're. And like, we do have to recognize there's literally no app you will ever choose that will do everything the way that you'd want it to do it. Right? Like it will not be perfect. All I can do is surface the ones that are the closest thing to perfect. So like, ultimately what my app recommendations are, are like, here are the best options as sourced from thousands of firms who are active users. You can for sure go against them. The recommendations, that is just know these are the best options that there are right now. To the question of getting more nuanced, I will say one thing that's nice about the direction these platforms are going right now is they are getting more specific in the types of firms they want to serve. Be it tax, be it bookkeeping, be it firms that do both. And we are trying to build that stuff into the recommendation so that it makes it very clear, like, hey, if you're this type of firm, this is more of an option for you. Last one. I want to move more to advisory services. My experience is mainly in bookkeeping and tax preparation work. Where do I start? The one thing I would say is don't get lured into the trap of a. The next thing you need to sell is advisory because it pays better. If in your accounting firm, you're the bottleneck, then if you're the only one that can sell advisory, it actually is making that bottleneck worse. And so advisory is a very hard thing to sell at scale. What I would rather sell is the stuff that we already do with a more premium service delivery. I think for most firms, there's a lot of hay that can be made there before they go into selling something that only you, only your unicorns can deliver. That being said, I'll tell you who crushes thought leadership for, for virtual CFO stuff is a guy called Michael King. Go look up Michael King on LinkedIn. He's got a whole ton of great content that is just for people who want to run fractional CFO practices. He is. He is the Jason Stats for fractional CFO practices, as it were. What a terribly narcissistic way to describe what he does. But if that's where your heart's at and you want to get into more advisory stuff, by all means, chase that dragon. Michael's stuff will be helpful there for you, gang. Hey, it was great to see you today. I would love to hear your feedback on this episode in the comments. Also, any questions you got, pop them down there. Send me a text, send me an email. I want to hear from you. This was fun. Hey, let's do this again. All right, I'll catch you in the next one.