573 This Accounting Firm Tech Is Dying ☹️

There is tech out there right now that five years ago, every accounting firm needed to buy that. Today, you should not be spending a dollar on. Due to the evolution of AI, the evolution of practice management systems. Actually, that's a really important factor. Entire app categories are now going extinct. So today we're going to talk about the app categories that are trending downward, the app categories that you should not touch at all, and the app categories whose stocks are up. Also, we got one brave soul who shared their tech stack. We're going to do a whole accounting firm tech stack glow up. We're gonna get to put our coaching hats on. We're going to talk about what they're using right now and what, if anything, is worth changing. And then after that, actually, right down here, I got a big. I got a big, big old bag full of mail right down here. Letters, postcards, all sorts of things people have been sending in. Got a fruitcake. That was very nice. We're answering questions about accounting firm M A M A being mergers and acquisitions. Recently actually misspelled in one of my videos. Said burgers and acquisitions. Not a joke. Wish it was. Whether or not it's worthwhile to switch to upfront payments with your clients, where to start with AI note takers and how to balance the tedium of like, value pricing or just. Just the amount of work that goes into pricing every single engagement and how to know where that's worth it or not. I don't know what to tell you. This is going to be a spicy one. Okay. All right, you ready? Let's do it. Bring everybody around. Got your chairs. The intro music's playing. It's starting foreign. Let's get right into it. I've got 11 categories of accounting firm tech and I still get questions from folks saying, do I buy A or B when A or B are both in a category where I think you should actually never buy tech in that category. Let's get right into it with a category that is trending down hard right now, and it is receipt management. I will say, at least in the U.S. receipt management, like a standalone app for receipt management, has never been less necessary than it is right now. Now actually, if you look at like globally, the need for receipt management and what goes into it in the US We've actually got it really, really easy. In fact, many aspects of receipt management are like an afterthought in the U.S. whereas in Canada, you have to have your hands on every single receipt. There's tax that's paid that it can actually like, come Back to you if you don't track all that stuff properly. Entirely different level of need as far as receipt tracking goes. But I will say at least for the US standalone receipt management apps, except for very specific situations, are increasingly unnecessary. And I would say the biggest name here is probably Dext, formerly Receipt Bank. They were acquired by Iris a year or two ago, which is usually not great news for an app. In fact, Payroll Relief, it's a payroll software platform in the US that the that Iris acquired a couple years ago. Absolutely went off a cliff this year. But these apps are trending downwards. Not helped by spend management apps getting more popular. Speaking. So the notion that you have a card and anytime you spend on that card you get a notification that says hey, give me a receipt for this right now. When all that stuff's being captured at the time of transaction, you don't have as much of a need for the after the fact receipt management app. Now a category that is trending upward that I'm actually very, very high on accounting ledgers. For the first time in over a decade we've actually got legitimate new folks coming into the market and finding market share. The biggest place where this is happening is the mid market where Netsuite and Intact used to sort of dominate. Two new AI first Sol Rillet and Campfire now control over 10% of the mid market market share. And I am so, so hopeful that the same thing is going to begin happening at the SMB ledger level. You may have seen another in my other content. My two favorites here right now are digits and kick full ground up accounting ledgers that right now are good enough for your clients, cash basis bookkeeping. And there's like, it feels like there's excitement around the accounting ledger for the first time in forever with the legacy providers you look at qbo, I mean after price increase, after price increase, like that's such a mature bloated product now that there's so much excitement and, and hunger from accountants for something new that something's gotta give here. You got some cool new stuff coming. You got people at peak levels of frustration with the old stuff. And I think it's gonna happen for as much as we wanted the whole cloud accounting era to be like, oh cool, you can like bolt on all the stuff that's necessary for a business and build your software in a very modular way. At the end of the day most people don't want to do that. Like some small business owners have no interest in that. We can come in and help them like build the right stack for them. But we're now 15, 20 years into the cloud accounting thing. Nobody's excited to have to bolt together a bunch of different apps. It's like we've got this pair of Crocs that we're very proud of and we have covered them in charms. They are just covered in charms for every little thing that we love. And we're so proud because these Crocs are uniquely ours, the biggest nerds among us. This is how we think of our accounting platforms, and I count myself among those people. But at a certain point, you just got to say, can somebody just build a better accounting ledger? And there's no such thing as a one size fits all solution here. I'd actually say the E Comm side is ahead of the curve here because you've got a number of accounting ledgers specifically for E commerce companies. But this category, accounting ledgers, it's picking up. Keep an eye on it. Next one that is trending down big time and it might even be dead, is document extraction. You look at tools like auto entry where you give it a bank statement and then gives you all the transactions back. Why do we need that anymore? Because extraction has gotten so trivial with AI that you either just go to ChatGPT for the same thing or all the other apps that you use. It's gotten very trivial for them to bolt this feature onto what they already do. And so the notion of going out to a document extraction tool and paying for credits for volume processing of something, it just makes sense in so few situations. Like, I'm sure there's very specific situations where you can still make the argument for it, but a standalone document extraction app, kind of pointless now. And you actually see these things like every single week someone will stand up a landing page to do some sort of document extraction because AI can do it very well. Like, thinking this is novel. And it's like gang, we've had extraction apps for a decade plus that we're doing it all with ocr. It's called all gotten much easier and much better thanks to AI and vision models. But that means it's gotten really easy to build into the rest of your tech stack. The other tools. So do you really need a standalone solution for document extraction? Next, a category that is trending up that is exploding right now. Tax Workflow is another US one. But everything happening around the tax software, there's so much investment going into that. And as much as I don't like Thomson Reuters, Thomson Reuters is to blame for it because of their $500 million cash acquisition of sure Prep happened two years ago and when everybody saw that, a lot of investment went into the space for new AI automation around tax. Now a lot of it is Nothing. In fact, 80% of it right now is nothing. Most of these companies haven't found that valuable angle yet. But the ones who have doing really, really cool stuff. As always, my app recommendations, I think they're linked in the show notes of every episode. They will show you the tax workflow solutions that are most real and most today ready. The next category that's trending downward. This may be a hot take. Bill pay. I said it. Bill pay. And this is also a category that I think right now is falling victim to just how easy really good document extraction has gotten. So if you look at the generalist bill pay solutions like, you know, like your Melios and even Bill to a degree because to me, Bill does not do anything all that complex. The reason so many people still use Bill is it's so bloody hard to get off of it because you got your vendors trained on the system and you're like, I really want to like change how everybody's getting paid. That's a nightmare. But five to seven years ago you had this explosion of like everybody was doing bill pay from like Pluto to like you go to an accounting conference and half of the booths there were these bill pay solutions you'd never heard of. That stuff I think is trivial enough right now to where it's just not that interesting anymore. Because modern banks, modern banks have pretty darn good bill pay. If you're using a spend management solution like ramp Ramp has pretty darn good bill pay and it's totally free. Where the opportunity remains. To me, and I would actually say the same about document extraction, where the opportunity remains is like what's the really hairy stuff? Sometimes it's going to be vertical specific where there's still an opportunity. But the generalist like trivial bill pay stuff, I mean that kind of feels like a feature now. It's not something that justifies the standalone app. The problem with the category as a whole is when all of your vendors are plugged into a specific platform that makes it really sticky and really hard to leave. Right next category that's trending up. And this will come as no surprise to you. Month end close automation. This may be the biggest change in all of accounting firm tech in the last five years. It is the tool that sits above all of your client ledgers and helps you automate the month end close of all those ledgers. A double formerly Keeper. They're really the ones that reinvented this category. You're now seeing a lot of other apps trend towards what Double built. In fact, on my app recommendations, if you look at all the apps that I have in the month End Close automation category, maybe not all, but most, there are a bunch of apps that used to do a bunch of random things like quality assurance and kind of all these kind of just a smorgasbord of random workflows and they're now all trending back towards, okay, we're a month end close automation solution that does all these other things too. Even Intuit has gotten in on the act. QuickBooks is shipping their own version of this. They call it Books Close. It's in beta. To date it's been free. Actually, just yesterday as I'm recording this, they announced that it's now going to be $8 per client per month or beyond some threshold. I think it's like 100 clients or something like that. It becomes $6 a month. This is part of the, the quote Intuit accountant suite, which is an accounting firm specific set of tools that Intuit starting to roll out. I mean, all of it is so, so early. In fact, arguably Books Close is kind of the only part of it that they've kind of sort of half built. But even calling book their Books Close functionality right now, half built is very generous. This is the stuff. This is what kills me is you see all the noise about Intuit Online and all the people from Intuit's partner council who are just like pumping this stuff up. And then in reality it's like this is not even a product yet. And you've got people who have been working on the same problem for years that have a very mature version of that solution. I got a thank you to Katherine, the CPA on Twitter, who got me a lot of this information. Even with the current version of Books Closed, Catherine said right now you have to manually recreate each closing period. And beyond that, there are many other things that are not ready. You literally have to go in and like manually create every single month. Stuff stuff into it says is coming soon. New vendor handling, W9, 1099 management, new customer handling, it's all this is to say it's still very early for Intuit's version of this. And even if you look at their vision for what their quote unquote accelerate package is, which is $150 a month for accounting firms, that's where it's starting, is the cheapest it will ever be. Let Me just read through the list of features here. These are the features in the in the plan you can spend $140 a month for. AI powered anomaly detection is in beta. Okay, so you're telling me Intuit that you want me to buy your accounting firm specific software that sits over the top of the accounting ledger and the job of that tool is going to be to make sure things were categorized right? AI Powered Anomaly detection. Why is that not a thing in the ledger? Why is that an added thing? Anyways, second bullet point Client Insights is in beta. Tax Payroll and Bill Pay Service Delivery Coming soon does that even mean that was written by a marketing person? Tax Payroll and Bill Bill Pay Service Delivery AI Powered Chat Coming Soon Advanced AI Agents Coming Soon Suborgs Coming Soon Dedicated support via Automatic Gold status in the Pro Advisor program Coming Soon I should say every single one of those bullets that I just read have either one or three asterisks on them. So into its working on a month end close automation solution which I would just say is proof of the legitimacy of that whole category. But please don't buy into its flavor of that dog food. Buy the leaders that are really good right now. Doubles really top of the heap there. But you can see all the tools in that in that category in my app recommendations just got fully triggered by Intuit. Man, we were doing great. Okay, next category is dead. D E D Dead and it is document management. Gasp. I know now there's more of an argument to be made for document management outside of the U.S. than there is inside of the U.S. in fact, internationally there's a lot of like almost sort of practice management systems that are document first. Like that's where they started. But we haven't really seen this pencil out in the US So the reason the document management is dead is it's a job that's really done by your practice management system now. And where you want your documents to live is in a place at least, at least the client facing documents is in a place where the clients can come in and grab a copy of them if they need like be able to self serve. I don't need a file cabinet where I can just put stuff for archival purposes that just needs to be in my file system. And then selectively I need to be able to expose those files to the client so they can pop in and get return copies without having to call the front desk. And so when you know, Thomson Reuters for example announced they're shutting down file cabinet I get a ton of messages that are like what's the file cabinet alternative that I need to go get. I'm like, you don't need a file cabinet alternative because you don't even need a standalone tool for this anymore. You know, you look at Smart Vault, you look at who else could I kill? Any future potential sponsorship deals with Smart Vault Share file. They're all doing jobs that are now done by your practice management system. Even like sharing a file with a link that's just a feature in your practice management system. Now I encourage you fight me in the comments. In fact, I'd love to hear like what's a use case for document management that practice management systems don't do well enough yet? Again, I think there's more arguments to be made outside the US for this than there are inside the US Otherwise we don't need to buy document management software. Hey, real quick, are you tired of fist fighting all these stupid banking logins that your client gives you and then you gotta like push a code to them and you do this super insecure back and forth where you're like hey, you know that code that you just got that says never share this code with anyone. Can you share that with me, gang? There's a better way to manage all this fuss is today's sponsor Mercury. Mercury is the fintech that 200,000 plus companies trust for banking and running their finances for banking and running their finances. Where traditional banking websites and apps are clunky and hard to use, Mercury it is meticulously designed to be an intuitive and simple experience for accountants. And it is honest goodness H2G what I use myself Mercury super secure platform and it comes with just all the user management stuff that a modern app has that we should really have with our clients when we're accessing their banking information. Now Mercury also has Mercury for accountants where you can get up to a $1,000 referral bonus per eligible client and some other platform features that are available just for accounting firms. Pretty cool stuff. Big fan of Mercury. Did a demo of them back on the channel. If you want to see what it looks like in like five or ten ten minutes, I got a disclaimer. Mercury is a fintech company, not a bank. Terms applies for bonus eligibility. See Show Notes for details. 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 can 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 Sorban 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 Sorben, 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. Next, a category that's trending up and this is going to be worldwide and it is going to be wild. It is Tax research is what let's call it for for now, but it will evolve into much, much more than this tax research though, whether you're in the US or anywhere else, the the kind of libraries for regulatory information. This has been a lifeless category for decades really. The only interesting thing has been people who will come along and build a more human accessible layer above the technical literature. I'm thinking stuff like tax book, quick finder US examples, but like people who will come in and build sort of a simplified library that just makes finding things and getting answers easier. That's the extent of innovation we've really had in research, beyond taking research from a physical book and putting it on a computer and making it searchable. Now AI's gotten tremendously useful at research and right now it's doing like a human assisted thing. But I mean we are not that far from a day where the AI like makes the decision like it can look at vastly more things than you and I can. And it changes how we do tax research. It also changes how like the entire like legal justice system works in fact. So founder of Blue J Tax, who I'd argue is probably the leader in the US for AI tax research solutions right now. He actually wrote a book a couple of years ago, what's it called? The L.I. the legal singularity. So his background, he's a law professor. I I'll track down the book and put a link to it in the Show Notes. But it's a very interesting read and it, it kind of runs through when AI can get to a correct answer instantly. How does that change the unbelievable inefficiencies in the legal system right now. And, and where are the gaps there? Like, because can you, can you really get to a perfect version of that? Right. Sounds pretty sci fi. But then that brings me to what is the future of quote unquote tax research apps? I think the future of tax research is probably quality assurance. So when it can very accurately fetch answers for what is right for a given scenario that you provide it with, you can then see you're not very many steps away from giving it a thing and asking it to ensure that that thing is correct. And that's a huge step. I mean any version of that that's very useful, let alone the version of it that rises to like human levels of capability as soon as we get hand off a tax return and a pile of work papers or month end clothes and all the work papers and then I can, you know, near instantly do a very comprehensive review of it. That's a huge step. But I think that's what makes this category really, really interesting is it is kind of in all likelihood in the future going to be the ones saying this is correct and this is not. I also think that's, I mean, Blue Jay raised $130 million, which is an outrageous sum to me. That has to be the future of the company, right? If you're talking about like what is the premise that we can put in front of investors that justifies that much money? It has to be today. It's tax research and the future it is. We're making the decisions like we're telling you what's right and what's wrong. Okay, next, the category that's trending down. This, this one will make a lot of people mad. Reporting. Okay, here's my argument for why reporting is trending downwards. For one, I don't think reporting's ever really penciled out the way that folks hoped five to seven years ago. There's a huge amount of investment going into tools like Fathom and Reach and Spotlight. And everybody's like, oh yeah, this is gonna help people run their businesses so much when we can just give them better reports. And there's a little bit of that, that's true, but a lot of that that's kind of fallen off the table. And if you've ever tried to like effectively roll this stuff out, the reality is it's hard to. What does the client need to see? It looks a little different from client to client. So I would say it's never really gotten to where it was supposed to get. But two, the last three years we've had an explosion in different options that are basically like fancy accounting ledger to spreadsheet integrators where they can pull all the reports out of the accounting system and present them in Excel or in Google sheets. And you can sort of move things around and customize that reporting and then get it to like live sync numbers in or just sync the numbers in every single month. And it's a much more flexible version of reporting that a lot of people prefer. And so the popularity of these apps growing, I would say has. Has held back the reporting category. And now, I mean I haven't seen anybody new in the reporting space in a long time. Spotlight got acquired by by zero, which felt like a headline rip from 2018. And I don't see people really talking about reporting apps so much. If anything, they talk about spreadsheet integration apps. So G Accon was kind of the original here again, all these apps are in my app recommendations. I would say Live Flow brought a lot of marketing to this category in the last few years and made a lot more people aware of the fact that like you can just get a tool that connect the ledger to a spreadsheet and then make your wildest dreams come true in a spreadsheet, which is kind of accountants preferred ways to work anyways. So those tools may be trending up, but reporting I would say is trending down pretty hard. Three more in the last one is the big wild speculative one. So two that are trending up. Spend management in the US Ramp has been the big winner here. Ramped actually was the fastest growing fintech of all time. Super clean platform. But as far as accountants go, you've got the, the benefit, the beauty of being able to like give out cards to people in the business with very strict limitations. I would say Divi probably was the first one that did a really cool version as of this that I got excited about. Since they've been acquired by Bill, I'm not that interested in divvy. So card management, great. But the even better thing for accountants and I think I, I think Chad Davis was the first person that I heard this from. He said if the receipt is not captured at the time of the transaction, it will never be captured. And that's what these platforms do really well is you've got an app for them on your phone and anytime anything hits your card, you get a notification and says, hey, provide a receipt for this thing that just came through. You can even connect it to your email and it will like automatically pull receipts out of your email and match them to transactions. And what I absolutely love is you can even create rules that like lock a card if receipts haven't been provided, which is an accountant's. I mean accountants hear that and they're like, oh my gosh, I need this. I think back to the a client that I had where she worked for a guy that had like seven different businesses and he had his whole team, they all had Amex cards and they all came through a single statement and there were things purchased for all the different companies even, and even all these different jobs within the different companies. And she would have to chase all of these people for the detail for every single transaction in these statements. An absolute nightmare. Like it was a full time job just chasing these people for that information when really now that should all be, that should all happen at the time of spend. And it's just gotten way easier to track because the platform is pushing all the users of the cards to get them this stuff. And then when the bookkeeper comes into the platform, all the stuff should already be there without them having to even lift a finger. That to me is the beauty of good spend management tools. Now the category that I think is trending up, tax resolution. I don't know what this looks like outside the U.S. in the U.S. we've got companies that were basically started by like former IRS people where they can say for any given type of notice, here's the best practice way to respond. And, and they give you the templates that make it way faster, like faster to respond, but also a much greater likelihood that the outcome is what you actually want. But then when you marry this with AI, the notion that these templates can then be slightly tailored for that specific client circumstances it's making. And there's a version of this, I don't want to sound too hyperbolic here, but it is making trivial a lot of tax resolution. Now the hairy stuff, you know the, the notice that you get from the IRS after you already responded that says we're going to levy X, Y, Z. I mean all the mess of having to handle that stuff for is a nightmare and a lot of work. But the simple stuff, the notice responses, I think that's kind of being trivialized with the right tech. Now the last category, that is the big looming question over not only the accounting industry, but pretty much all of white collar work. We talked about it the other day. It is the notion of this AI agent layer of technology sitting on top of all the apps. We already use the app, the AI on your computer that can log into quickbooks and pull this thing into your practice management system and do this and can work across all those different things that isn't real yet. It just isn't. There's very, very early versions of this, but not useful versions of it yet, not secure versions of it that we can use, but any version of that that becomes useful where you can set it to do this trivial thing at 9am every morning because app A doesn't integrate with app B. And I just, I need the files moved that got uploaded here to this other system. Like that changes everything. Once we have those AI agents that can do the trivial, monotonous stuff for us, I would argue accountants, because we are, we are kind of the integrators for small business for getting the accounting system to, to work. We automate as much as possible and, and then what we end up doing after that is all the stuff that slips between the cracks. We as much as anyone else see the dumb, trivial things that we wish didn't exist but still need to be done. As opposed to a lot of people on the outside, like software engineers who are guessing at what the problems are. We know what the problems are and we. Some of those problems exist across our entire client base. Some of those problems are specific to just a single client. But to have the dream assistant who can run in the background and do that thing meticulously the way that you tell it, to do it reliably every single time and then to have an infinite number of those agents at your disposal, that's really exciting, right? That's why there's so much investment going into the whole AI agent thing. And honestly, the agent I really don't believe in so much is the AI agent inside of our individual apps. In fact, I talked with a very high profile person about this. I shouldn't say who it was at maybe the largest accounting software company in the world, maybe second largest. They just kind of given this thought leader talk about the cool agents they were building for their platform and we kind of had a side where other people couldn't hear. And I was like, here's the thing though, what agent is going to win? The agent that only exists inside of your platform or the agent that works in your platform and all the other tech that I use. And he was like, yeah, no, I know what you mean. We'll see. Now it doesn't mean that you shouldn't still build agents within a platform if they're useful, but the mega agent, the agent over the top of all of my apps, that one's got the highest ceiling that could potentially do the most for me. Right. Because so much of what you and I do is taking the output from this program and providing, doing some sort of logic and then putting that information into this other program or into a file system or something like that. And until I have an agent that can hop across those different apps, work honestly the way that I work, then you can see where the AI agents inside of just one platform will only get you so far. So to recap, the only category I said was totally dead. I would say right now in the US it is document management. And it's why you see, you know, Share File now is going really hard on tax workflow, Smart Vault. I don't know, I don't know what Smart Vault is doing, but you'll see these document management apps like they have to now somehow get into workflow to stay relevant. So document management's dead. The other one that's closest to that I would say is document extraction. But what does that mean for your firm's tech stack? Let's put the old coaching hats on. Now we're going to dig into the entire tech stack of a real accounting firm here. We're going to look is what they've got enough. Is it worth changing anything right now? And if you would change anything, in what order would you make said changes? We're going to walk through it together. Let's roast this tech stack. If you want to get your tech stack anonymously roasted, send it to me, email it to me, DM it to me, text it to me. My number is 1516-980-4968. For real, for real, for real. Send it to me right now. Can't promise I'll get to all of them, but I can promise that I'll receive your text. Okay, here's the tech stack. Currently we have a physical on site server that will need to be replaced in 2026 and we have 10 workstations running on it. For tax we use Drake Tax, Drake accounting for 1099 and Drake portals. So this is, this must be a US firm. We have QuickBooks online, we have Google Workspace for email Calendar and Gemini, Microsoft 365A copilot, you got both ChatGPT business subscription. They use cognito forms to receive information from clients and potential clients in a standardized format. Their phone system is a voiceover IP through something called an elevate app administered by their local IT group. They use humble fax. Yes, non U.S. firms, fax is a thing in the U.S. they said they tried Taxdome about five years ago and it was an epic failure. They tried inflow for audits and reviews in 2025 and it was an epic failure. They're currently using Thomson Reuters physical guides and checklists to perform these. We only have two recurring audits. Okay, so it sounds like they're doing a bit of everything. A team of 10 doing tax books and some audit. Audit and a test work, comps, reviews. Let me first just give a real hard truth here, because if you send this to me and you say, here's my tech stack, it's also really helpful for me to know what have you tried that maybe didn't work? Because the one thing that is not standardized across all people is what's good enough. Because there is no app that is perfect. And so one thing that, that I will just say aloud here is that there are some people that I run into for whom no new app works. They simply can't change the way that they're doing things. Any app that they look at, they're like, this thing's terrible and they throw it out. If that's the case, we gotta look in the mirror. Similar to how like, you know, a good idea or thought leadership. Some people are very capable of absorbing useful bits from that, while others are not, while others will very quickly discard anything and say, that's not relevant to me. But wouldn't you rather be the person that's like, I can see this perspective and I can see this nugget to sliver within it that is useful to me. Me, like, wouldn't you rather be the person that's capable of extracting more value than other people from the same thing? I know I would be. If we look at tech, there's a world where your needs are so specific that nothing will ever be good enough and your bar is so high that it's like, well, this just won't work for us. Somehow we have to try to like, not be that person. And then a really helpful thing as far as I'm concerned, is learning from other smart people who may already use that platform. We mentioned Taxdome here, and they said Taxdome five years ago, which Taxdome five years ago is not what Taxdome is right now. I know brilliant people who run firms on Taxdome, and those firms are absolutely printing money. If you find yourself in a situation where you just can't get your head around how to run a firm on a specific platform that you know other people are using, that's an important thing. Because there's a Lot of platforms out there that are just, just crap. If it is a recommended platform that is very good, then usually the thing to do is, is how do I get time with the people who are having success with this to understand what are they running differently about their firms? Because we are like we don't realize just how much tunnel vision we have to how we do things. And oftentimes you will have one conversation that will open up your entire universe and change your next three years. So don't try like let's try not to be the people for whom nothing will work. And I'm saying that this person is. But it's something to be careful about. And if you feel stuck on that, go out and find some smart people who somehow are not stuck on that. The more time you spend with them, the more their reality will become your reality. 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. Wouldn't 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 workflow stuff. It has a deep integration into the accounting ledger. It 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 of 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 to 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 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 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 than 60 seconds. 24 days a week, 7 hours a day. 24, 7. That's a bad joke to make. That's not clear. 24 hours a day, 7 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. Okay, first for audit, I would say don't bother with any audit tech. You're doing two audits a year. Is an argument to be made that like, at that volume is it even worth doing two audits a year? But I would not build any element of your tech stack around audit because it's such a small part of what the firm is doing. I would say stick with the Thompson Reuter stuff you're using right now. Now for tax, because it sounds like this is probably a tax first firm. If I had to, to point you in one direction without having any other context. What, what is the easiest place to get a tech win? I would say it would be to pull in a 1040 intake solution. This is a pretty future proof software decision. That's an easy win and you can even roll it out on like a client by client basis to test it out. So right now I think they're, they're using cognito forms for this. Maybe still hang on to cognito forms for like new client intake because that's pretty static, pretty boilerplate. The beauty of 1040 intake automation solutions is they're totally customized to pro forma to the tax return last year. Like every single question is tailored down to what did we actually need last year? So there's no waste, there's no boilerplate here. Now the three leaders on my app recommendations as I record this for this are Stanford Tax Trusts and Sorban. To my knowledge, Sorban is the only three that has a minimum purchase commitment where you have to commit to 150 returns. That means for these other apps you could hop in and do some testing and be like, is this going to be worthwhile? And it doesn't mean you got to do it with 100% of your, your 1040s. It doesn't even mean that your clients need to have any different of an experience. You can actually just use these tools internally so that when you get the documents, you pile them all into a single place, it figures out what you have and what you still need and takes a ton of the grunt work out of information gathering. It actually can reduce that to like an admin level where it's something historically a tax Pro would have had to do. So if I pushed you one direction, I would say pick up an intake automation solution. Beyond that, I think we got to go back to the practice management conversation. For a firm like yours, there's probably four systems you should look at Tax Dome, know that it's changed a lot in the, in five years. Also pull in an implementer. This is so, so important is these practice management systems are so complex and there's so many different ways to set them up that we think we can just wade into it and figure it out ourselves without any sort of context from other firms. There are people who have done implementations for each of these platforms for a hundred plus different accounting firms. And if you engage that person at the time that you're going to make that transition, it will make your setup so much faster. It will make you know the level of optimization you will have after five years, that will become possible in year one. And when you're going through that transition with a team, that implementer actually becomes a really helpful foil for you to be able to diffuse some of the change management angst across both you and the implementer. There's situations where they can be the bad guy, where otherwise you would have to be, and that's actually a really big thing. So I know we don't want to spend more money in what will already be an expensive change, but consider the cost of trying to roll out a PM and it not working, or it being wildly inefficient like that implemented as money well spent. Want to implement a recommendation? Shoot me a DM or an email, something like that. Happy to make a connection. I've been thinking about putting out like a little black book of sorts that is just like my network. Who do I recommend for XYZ implementation of all these different platforms? Firm brokerage financing for. For buying a firm like I've been, I got a little list going of where are all the places that I would go for this and I'm thinking about putting that out. The only problem is it's kind of like finding a babysitter. The last thing I'm going to do is tell any of my friends about the babysitter we got. Before you know it, the next time you call her, she's like, nope, I'm booked up for the next six months. So a little bit of trepidation on that. I also worry as soon as I put out that list that like people start hounding me and are like, oh, how do I get in your thing? And it becomes, I don't know, kind of not fun. Anyways, for tax intake automation, that's where to start. Then look at the PM. This is an after tax season thing. Look at four platforms. Tax Dome, Canopy, Carbon or Firm360. If you have access to other firms that are users of these platforms, that can actually steer you to a better decision for you. If you have five friends that use one of these, go with what your friends use because the ability to text them and ask them like hey, what do you do for X, Y and Z? That is gold. Like so invaluable. Any of these four platforms you can find success with, but that's probably the next thing I'd recommend. Only other thing for bookkeeping, I can't tell what sort of bookkeeping volume you do, if any, because it sounds like you're a tax first firm. I wouldn't go with the practice management system that is accounting first, I would put Financial Sense, I would put Client Hub in that bucket. So because we're going with a tax first practice management system, I would use a standalone tool for month end close automation. In your case, I'd probably pull in double. If you're doing, you know, 10 or more month end closes a month for clients, pull in double. And that's just a vastly more efficient way to get your monthly bookkeeping work done. Only thing that's maybe missing here is a proposal app. The leaders right now are Ignition and Anchor. I would say my leaders are. In my opinion most practice management systems don't really do a good enough version of putting proposals in front of clients. I also don't mind having my proposal and invoicing software being separate than my workflow software because if I want to change my workflow software down the road, I don't want all my clients payment methods and all that to be reset up in a new system. Last infrastructure you mentioned you need to replace your server in 2026. My take right now. And local IT shops will not tell you this because local IT shops make their money selling you hardware and then servicing the hardware they sold you. I don't think you need a server these days in your setup. All of your Drake hosting could go to a really good hosting provider. My three favorites right now are Verito, rightworks or Ace hosting. Even your phone system which right now is done by your IT system. Phone systems are really pretty plug and play now just like a SaaS app. Look at, you know, Ringcentral. It's a little dated now. My favorite's actually Quo Q U o used to be called Open Phone and it's, it's just. It's a SaaS app. Like it's. It's not a. You can actually get physical handsets if you want to. Handset, headset. Not sure but I would try to do away with the in office infrastructure, especially if you're going to have to drop a pile of cash on a whole new server in 26. So in summary, Quickest wins probably a tax workflow solution. I would try to get off the server after the tax deadline and then after that I would revisit the practice management conversation. But dear listener would love to hear from you. Have you used any of these apps? Anything that he just mentioned that was great? Anything that was not great? Different advice that you would give. Drop that note below and you can actually save a thousand of other people a headache because I say this and Then people's eyes go down to the comments, the YouTube viewers anyways, and they're like, oh, is there any like details here that are going to save me potentially choosing the wrong platform? Do it, man. Share that information. You could save somebody else's bacon. Okay, Mailbag time. Mailbag. Mailbag. This segment is cold. First up, I'm in the midst of my second acquisition. Now this is a question, I'm not saying this, trying to figure out how to transition traditional CPA build when completed clients. Okay, so, so work billed after the fact. And to pay upfront and pay online clients. We won't get 100% to convert, but any conversions will be a win. Going to wait until next year to institute upfront payments, just not enough time between when we close the purchase and now. So how do you transition after the fact paying clients to upfront paying clients? I can tell you the biggest hack that got. Let's see, in our first year we moved 1800 1040s to upfront billing and in the end I got like 58% to go through the online like self service, set up a payment for the first time, accept the proposal. And I would say 58% in a pretty legacy client base, I would call that success. After that you get the 58% and it's just the rest that you gotta work through. First year will, will always be the hardest. But I would say what actually gave us the most success here is we sent out communications saying, hey, for the first time we're gonna give you a price upfront. And that price, it is a changing in, in the upward direction. And you can see that price right now by going to this platform. In fact, you need to, because we don't want to start work if you're not okay with this price. And so that gave everybody a level of motivation to know like, oh geez, I want to see what this price is. And they went out to the platform. So there's a, there's a way where you can frame this as doing a service to the client because the worst thing for everyone involved is if we get to the end of the project and you give them the number and there's that big tada moment of how much are they going to charge me? And the client's like, well, I'm not going to pay that. Great trick from Geraldine Carter. If you're trying to figure out how to write that communication in a way that isn't me, me, me. Because most of our accounting firm communications very much written through the lens of well, we needed to do this, and we're doing that. Drop that communication into ChatGPT and give it the prompt. Make this sound like it's great news for the client, reframe it as a win for them, and you will come out of that with some really, really good ideas. So how do we frame this as a win for them? Hey, you're going to get to see the price upfront for the first time. Go here to check it out. Great. Now they're in your proposal platform. And while you're not taking deposits upfront this first year, I would highly recommend taking payment methods upfront. So to accept the proposal, they just have to put a payment method in. That's what I did and I think it worked pretty well. Kind of a related question, I'd imagine. Another benefit of upfront billing is likely tighter scoping of work. Did you notice it became easier to recover scope creep or additional work instead of just writing off time? I would say this is the case in bookkeeping work. Month over month bookkeeping work, because that just has such a tendency to meander throughout the year. Every month you're doing a little bit different stuff and before you know it, nine months down the road, you've added a whole bunch of things that you forgot about. But with year over year tax work, I probably wouldn't say that upfront billing made it easy any easier than hourly billing to manage scope. So much of scope creep is kind of handled automatically by hourly billing because you can see the time blow up. The trouble is there's all sorts of other reasons why time can blow up. And then when you get more efficient, you actually get punished. I say that you get more efficient, you're not going to bill somebody any less. You're going to look at what you charged them last year. And I think, what can I charge on this year? Pick a number. So the case of annual tax work, I wouldn't say billing upfront helped with scope management. The one sneaky benefit of taking money upfront that I've heard from a lot of firms is when they've already put some money down, they're much more engaged in the process. So they are more responsive, they're getting back to you faster, they're more involved because they've already paid for something and so they feel like they now have to extract the value from this as opposed to someone that's just built after the fact. You don't always have that same motivation. Sure doesn't apply to every client, but that's a consistent theme that I've actually Heard unprompted from a number of different firms. Next up, Jason, new to Realize and loving it. Thank you very much. Realize, my online community of over 700 accounting firms. How could it help you based on the things we've talked about already? I'm going to a new practice management system and Realize we have meetups for all the major practice management systems at least every other month. Inside of Realize, every time somebody posts a comment their practice management system, there's an icon for it right next to their name. There's also an icon for the size of their firm. There's an icon for their service mix. So anytime somebody comments in Realize, you see all the context of how big their firm is, what software they use, all that stuff. Great place to make friends meet people who are running the same practice management system. In fact, right now, and this only happens once a quarter the next two weeks we're placing people into mastermind groups so you will immediately make a small group of friends that closes less than two weeks from now. Ever thought about this is a great time to do it? 180 bucks a month, maybe the best investment you ever make in your firm. That's Realize. There's a link down in the show, notes Jason, new to Realize and loving it. Quick one for you. With Carbon as our practice management system, which AI note takers do you suggest? Let's look at my app recommendations. The folks that I have in the leader category are abacore, Ping and Vinyl. Those are three different meeting note takers just for accounting firms. Meeting Toker meeting meeting Tote takers. If you're unfamiliar, they take a perfect transcript of your meeting so you can have kind of perfect recall. You can go back and search those transcripts. But they also give you some other really cool workflow hacks like I got to train somebody on a new client. Wouldn't be great to have all those transcripts. We did a YouTube video where we we built an automation to automatically identify testimonials from things clients say in meetings. Wouldn't that be nice to automatically harvest that stuff out of meetings? Anyways, they're using Carbon. Which AI notetaker is best? Vinyl has a Carbon integration. Abacore has a Carbon integration. They say the Ping integration is coming soon. That being said, a reminder with integrations, integrations matter, but they are not as important ultimately as the functionality of the app. Does the app do the job that you need? Because if there's another similar app that does the job way better integration, it is a systems issue. You can always have somebody manually integrate Something if you have to. And that is so uncool to say these days because everybody wants everything to talk to each other nicely, automatically move stuff from A to B. Here's the thing though is if the underlying tool doesn't do the job that you need it to do, or there's another one that does it way better, at the end of the day we have to weigh the time savings of is this more helpful for my professional team and saving them time? And how does that time savings compare to the time that could be that of an admin that is manually integrating a couple of things? I think it was Elon Musk that said this. When they were first building factories for Tesla, they went into building these factories and they were like, we're going to have robots do every single part of it. There's actually not going to be a single human inside of these factories building these cars. And they very quickly realized there are some things that are just incredibly hard for robots to do. And he said the lesson coming out of that is it's actually pretty cheap to employ humans to do very specific jobs. Humans are much more flexible than robots in many ways. And like there's some very real truth to that in accounting firms that we have a lot of systems issues where we don't have clear expectations for what needs to happen to always get that file from system A to system B and it falls back on your professional staff because we don't have a clear system for it. When this is really an opportunity for admins to come in and help us and that assistant, like that's not a super expensive role. So integrations, they absolutely matter. But start with functionality. If a platform has superior functionality, see how much time is this going to save me? How much value is in this and how does that compare to the integration headache if we then have to do some of that manually? 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 Makers 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 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 accurately. 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, Makers 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. We got a client you want to share this with. I would say either send them the landing page or send them one of the demos 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. So this last fall, we did a tour of 13 cities hosta 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 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 account 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 in the show notes. Next up, on value pricing, you say that the best way to do three tier proposals is to adjust, like at the contact level. So three tier proposals being unique at the level of each contact, which, you know, package they have or something like that. But that seems incredibly tedious to keep track of. How would you manage who gets one business day emails versus a week? So reminder on my three tier pricing, I think the scope of the work that you present to clients is the same on all three tiers. What I think is actually different from bronze, silver and gold is how premium is the service delivery. Do they have access to you or do they only have access to your team? Are we going to get back to them in a day or are we going to get back to them in a week? That's how we price gold versus silver versus bronze. We're selling coach business class and first class. We're not selling a little bit of work, more work, a lot of work. The reason for all this is you have people that will pay two to three times as much for more premium service delivery and it really doesn't take any more time to do the work. So that's an easier way to make more money premium service delivery than doing three times the work. I also think most of us would rather work with a smaller number of people that we go deeper with than run a volume shop. I think that resonates with most folks. So the question here feels incredibly tedious to then have to track what level of service we're providing to every single client. So to clarify a couple of things here, that level of service should be set for like everything we do for a person. So if a person, if we do that personal tax return and the bookkeeping for their business and the bookkeeping for their rental and the bookkeeping for the management company, level of service needs to be universal across all those things wherever it lands. Because they're going to call me with one question about little Timmy's FAFSA application, one question about whether they can write off summer camp, and two questions about the financial statements for their business. And you're not going to say like, well, you can only talk to me about this because you only got this advance plan on your business. We're not going to do that. So it needs to, whatever that service level is, needs to apply to all the companies and sort of quote unquote clients that are associated with that contact. But to bring it specifically back to the email question, how do you track who gets one business day emails versus one week? This is something that there's great software for. It's just not the norm inside of accounting firm spaces. For example, tracking one business day response versus a week, practically impossible to do in Microsoft Outlook. But you have, you know, what are called SLAs or service level agreements that are very commonplace and honestly most types of businesses, part of the contract says you have to get back to me within this time frame. I mean imagine having vendors in very time sensitive, sort of hairy contexts. It's very important to have an agreement as to just how quickly they have to come and fix their stuff. If you have a local IT company that may be part of the contract of this is if something goes down, they have to be there within X hours to fix it. And so this is more of a limitation of like Microsoft Outlook, which is what most accounting firms use for email management. Carbon is, is without a doubt the strongest practice management system as far as email management goes. It's not the strongest at all things, but it does email very well otherwise. I mean I like I would not run my firm on Outlook or Gmail. It's just not a great way to like centrally manage email across my whole team. What I use right now is Missive. Missive works with, I think they said over 500 accounting firms now. We did a demo of missive on the YouTube channel like three months ago. People loved it. People got freake out. But for example, a platform like missive at the contact level, we just, we identify what service level they have. And so these emails kind of like tasks become overdue. And so you can see like oh, one day away, two days away and that stuff automatically can get escalated to Ensure that everybody's being serviced the way that they're supposed to be serviced. As you start thinking about how to run an accounting firm, not around just fulfillment, taking work in the door and setting it out the door, which is like kind of what most of us are doing. We're just shoveling coal, right? Just trying to get the stuff out the door. And then somebody calls you or a client emails you and you're like, leave me alone. Don't you realize you're just. You just keep me from doing what I gotta get done. As we transition from just like being heads down and just trying to get stuff out the door, to instead selling that like the client experience and them being impressed by us and them getting great service, we have to start thinking not just about how to staff the getting of the work done, but how to staff the service delivery, which by the way is the most profitable thing that you can sell. You send a big old complicated proposal to a client with all these technical things on it. You're very impressed by. What does the client say in response? Okay, but can I call you? Can I email you? How long will it take you to get back to me? That's what the client cares about. And for the VIP person that wants access and wants quick answers and all that, that will pay two or three times as much. That's a five times as profitable engagement. Just for faster email delivery times, maybe access to you instead of access to the team. So you take one of those projects, you cut four traditional projects, you're now doing the fifth of the work and you have the capacity to think about like, okay, how do we properly staff service delivery and ensure that we're getting back to them in a day instead of a week? To me, that's a vastly more calm firm to run. I think if we're not careful, what we naturally get sucked into. All of us is running a volume firm. You're saying yes to client after client. We're butted up against capacity. We don't have time to build relationships with clients. For some reason we get sucked into that. Maybe because every new project is more money, but the path to better profitability, which may not mean more revenue, but it means more bottom line, is serving fewer people who will pay you more for more premium service delivery. Hopefully that makes sense. It's a bit of a paradigm shift, but it to me is the best escape from running a volume shop. Kind of a related question. I understand your view of having packages tailored to each client, but in that case, how should I present packages on My website. You shouldn't. I think presenting packages on a website is actually a huge trap because it makes you look like. And I, I think in a recent podcast I, I talked about this, so I won't go too deep, but it makes you look like a one size fits all sort of thing. I mean, I, you could have a package with three options and then you're a three size fits all thing. But when somebody skims through all the things in those offerings, if they think that all you sell is those packages, then when they see something they don't need, they're not going to buy it. It will feel wasteful. Right? It's the same thing as if your home Internet provider makes you bundle in a home phone line. You actually may be totally fine with the price that you're paying, but because there's a home phone line there, it feels wasteful. You feel like you're throwing money down the drain because part of what you're paying is for the home phone line. Now imagine if they sold you the same thing but didn't even show you the home phone line. You would actually feel better about paying the same price. And so this is the problem with putting boilerplate offerings in front of clients is they will find waste in there. And regardless of what the number is, it will feel as though they are wasting their money because you're not tailoring to their needs. And so a helpful concept here from kind of other sales paradigms is called downselling. You can actually show them all these options, but then very intentionally be like, you don't need that, you don't need that, you don't need that. And you like strike through all the things they don't need. And when you do that, the people are like, yeah, no, yeah, I don't, I don't need that. You were listening to me. And it builds this reciprocity where they're like, okay, now you've built something that's totally tailored to me and the result is the price could be the exact same, but to them it feels like a better value. So I would say don't put packages on your website. What you should put on your website is examples of great clients and the types of clients you want to attract. So we're not putting like the actual client identity out there. But if I want to work with multi office vet clinics, I'm going to put one of my A clients on there. I'm going to put their revenue level, I'm going to put the problems that they had when they first came to us I'm going to put in broad brushstrokes, the work that we do for them, and a range of what somebody like that should expect to pay month over month. So I'm going to put examples that will give people a sense of the fees, but it also helps them to self select into like, oh, I'm just like that, or oh, I'm feeling that problem right now. That means this is the firm. For me, that's a much better thing to present in my opinion, than packages because packages are very much take it or leave it. And there is no such thing as any package that perfectly maps to the person that has come to your to your website. Even if you think it does, they don't think it does because they probably don't understand what a lot of those things mean and don't even know what they need. So don't even try to communicate that up front. The job of your website actually is not to get somebody to commit to this humongous engagement. That is everything. The goal of the website is to commit them to just take the next single step. And an easy trap with websites is to show what is 10 steps down the road. When the goal is I only want them to take one step and maybe that's to get on a call with me or maybe that's to watch this YouTube video that I made or download this lead magnet. Because that one step now means they'll take the second step where if I only showed them step 10, they never would have gotten a step two. So get those packages out of there, show some very happy clients and think about what should step one be. You know, what steps two through ten are. But the website ought to be optimized to get them to step two. I recently launched an accounting and tax advisory firm in Saudi Arabia. There's a question. I didn't do this, they did. Focusing on SMEs and international investors, the market here is extremely price compressed, interesting, and highly competitive. Almost every firm pushes low margin bookkeeping, VAT and filings at scale. Okay, so Saudi Arabia, highly competitive. Everybody's kind of trying to win on price. One of the. I'm not a big fan of value pricing literature because it just feels so like way up here and inaccessible. But one valuable takeaway from that stuff is that anything can be decommoditized. And so when we talk about commodities like, you know, and investing like, you know, gold or silver, like those are sort of classic commodities. They are what they are. Gold for one person is the same as gold for somebody else. So the markets can agree on what the price for an ounce of gold ought to be. But if you go to the grocery store, if you think about things that are commodities, it is like, you know, paper towels could be commodities, but then you've got one company that is like running ads that is like, well, this paper towel is wet, and I can put all these children's toys on and they don't tear through the paper towel, you know, window cleaner. How do you decommoditize that? Well, this one, this is all organic ingredients, and it smells nice or something like that. Everybody's trying to escape commoditization, and truly anything can be decommoditized. You look at coffee. What was coffee before Starbucks? I mean, it was my grandma drinking Folgers every morning. Imagine going to someone in that era and telling you how much money a cup of coffee from Starbucks can cost. Anything from coffee to toilet paper can be decommoditized. So in a firm like this, in a market like this, you just have to find the path to decommoditization that starts with working with a more specific type of person that's currently underserved by that setup. Because there's no market in the world where the generalists can serve people with very specific problems well and so find very specific problems for people that have money to pay. And you're looking for expensive problems, problems that stand in the way of them making more money, so that when you solve those problems, there is big profit upside to those problems being solved so that you can then charge top dollar for what you're doing. So this kind of comes back to the question of specialization and niching down and how to start with that. Because truly anything can be decommodit de commoditized. If TP can be commoditized, your accounting firm service delivery can be as well. Last one is your Hold Me Softly album. Free for use. Hold me softly. So two years ago, I released an album on Spotify called Hold Me Softly. It is lo fi remixes of the IRS hold music. That's not a joke. Go search my name on Spotify. Honestly, they. They slap too. They're really good. We hired like actual legit music producers to put together an entire album. I think we worked with six or seven producers of remixes of the IRS hold music, and it is all available royalty free, meaning you can take that music and use it however you want. You can use it at a live event. You can use it as the hold music on your phone system. In fact, I'll put in the show notes. I'll put the Google Drive link to actually get the audio files for all 11 tracks in that album and you can go wild with it. Use it for whatever you want. There's a lot of times in this business where we've just burned cash needlessly. That was one of the situations where I was most proud of how we burned that money because the album actually turned out really good. Gang, you're looking great today, man. You're going to crush this week. I know you will. You got any questions? Drop a comment, shoot me a text, shoot me an email. I enjoy coming and having this conversation with you every day and I will see you back here in the next one. Tell a friend, actually tell a friend. Leave a review on a podcast platform. I never asked for that. It really does make a big difference. Appreciate you and I'll catch you in the next one.