575 Accounting Firm Referrals: The Complete Guide

Today on the podcast, we are talking about referrals. It's the way that most people build their accounting firms, but they can also be the thing that is holding you back, that is going to run your accounting firm into the ground. So we're going to talk about how to get more of them, how to get the right types of referrals, who good referral partners are and who bad referral partners are and how these answers and how these answers evolve. If you are a new firm versus a mature, established firm. Also one brave soul, bless their heart. We're going to coach them through some changes to their accounting firm website. Going to be some nuggets in there for anyone who's ever, ever grappled with. Is my accounting firm website any good? Let's be real that we all grapple with that, right? And last, we're going to hit the mailbag. Whole bunch of questions, everything from listeners of this podcast, getting together to do some AI stuff, my upcoming live tour, coming to 20 cities in the US talking AI security, talking advice for someone considering getting into tax work, and the most asked question that I get to date. We are answering it today. Jason, I why do you wear a watch on both wrists? What do you need? We need two times. What are you tracking two time zones at the same time? Look at you, Mr. Worldwide. Hey, we're going to talk about it. Come on in. Let's get right into it. If you're new here, welcome to the Jason on Firms podcast where I basically coach accounting firms. Whether you run a firm, whether you aspire to run a firm, or whether you work for a firm and you just, you just want to get home at dinner, by dinner for once in your life. We talk about accounting firm stuff here. And most accounting firms will proudly tell you that they get by on referrals. In fact, they'll proudly say, we've never had to market our accounting firm, implying we have such a fount of abundance coming in the door that we don't even have to try. Now, you got other firms where that's, that's not where they're at. Maybe they're earlier on, maybe they're just struggling to get that traction. But referrals goes without saying, play a huge part in how we build our client lists. And at the end of the day, your accounting firm, which runs on the same tech as every other accounting firm, delivering by and large the same services as every other accounting firm, the quality of your accounting firm ultimately boils down to the quality of your client list. So if most of Our clients get there from referrals. We need to be putting some serious thought into how we strategize strategies, strategize around the right referrals and how to get more of them. So let's start with what to do and what not to do when it comes to referrals. First things first. And I think I first picked this up from Karen Rayburn who's run. Oh, we actually, we just did an interview with Karen, didn't we? She's got pretty much the longest running accounting firm marketing agency in the world that I'm aware of. She said basically for every referral you get, there are at least as many, if not more would be referrals that checked you out, but maybe just didn't follow through. And we think of referrals as like, well, somebody on my client list or maybe some other person in my network will tell that person to come work with me and then they'll just come and do it. The reality is most of those people, when they are sent that recommendation, they still fall off. They will all check you out, they will go to your website, they will find anything they can see about you online. But that doesn't mean that they will all reach out and actually make that contact. And so even if you are fully reliant upon referrals, what people can see and learn about you online still matters. And this is where oftentimes you're like, well all I get is referrals. And so I don't need a website, I don't need to put any thought into this stuff if that's what you're doing, if maybe you're offline right now just relying on referrals, recognize there's a whole bunch of people who are not reaching out, who are being referred to you because they don't see anything about you online. And so there's a version of marketing and I hate to say the M word to accountants because as soon as I do they're like, see you later brother. Not interested in that. There's, there's a version of marketing that's not even about like going out and finding a cold audience on social media or building an email list or something like that. There's a version of marketing that's just, do I look like a grown up professional who is capable when potential refer. Referrales referreds come and explore what I do before getting in touch. There is no like complete strategy for running an accounting firm that involves not having a website, being professionally invisible. I, I was someone got in touch, maybe A week or two ago talking about how they were trying to just grow beyond these clients that they've had forever and, and kind of go full time for the first time. They've been kind of, kind of been doing it as a halftime gig and had been largely serving the same folks for like almost 10 years. And the email that I got was from an MSN email address. And as you can imagine, they didn't even have a website. So even if you're totally reliant upon people just sending you work, we can't be profess, invisible. But here's the trap with referrals. This is the biggest mistake that accounting firms make when it comes to referrals is they will take pretty much anyone and everyone that somebody on your client list will send you. And, and to tell you just how problematic this can be, let's, let's hop in the old time machine, roll back, I don't know, seven or eight years. So I last had a 40 person accounting firm and it was, it was an 80 year old tax firm when I bought it that had all of the legacy trappings that you would expect. And one of the things that it had collected was 80 years of friends and families and soccer coaches of all of the partners that had ever been at that firm. And it was definitely a generalist firm. But if you had asked the partners, do you have any niches, any specializations? The one that they might have said was ministers. And if you looked at the tax work that we did, we had a big number of ministers who we did for less than 200 bucks a tax return generally. And this was the clip closest thing that the owners would have described to having a niche. Now when I bought the firm and I dug into this a little more and I, I'll try to explain this in a way that, or it won't be struck down by lightning or smoked by a meteor or something like that. These ministers, lovely people. But the reason that we collected so many of them was because we were doing like 130 tax returns. And so one minister talks to another minister, like where do you get your stuff done? They're like, oh man, I get, you got to go down to this for we. I'm gonna scream and deal. They're great people. You won't get a better deal anywhere else. But the way that we can talk about this sometimes is like, oh, we have this, this great relationship with the community. We're supporting X, Y, Z. We're doing all these different things. And that can be true, but it can also be true that they're not going to get a better deal anywhere else. And that's why they're still with you and that's why they will also send a bunch of people to you. Now, by and large, these ministers we're working with, they're doing fine. And it's not even to say that like we shouldn't be, I don't know, helping them. But if you've been around the podcast long, you know that I'm, I'm kind of anti low bono work. I'm either doing work at my full rates or I'm doing pro bono work. Because the people who like most need my help are not the people that are like rolling around in Alexis. And so whether for you and that's, that's my version of that, it was ministries, you probably have your own version of it that, that could even be slightly like, like mission driven or tied to sort of something from your background. And this can be a dicey thing because they are hard people to, to say no to. But if you look at your entire client list, here's what I've found when it comes to referrals, is that the clients that will most heavily refer what you do are oftentimes the ones who are, quote, getting the best deal. And that's usually not the people that I want more of. And by client headcount, oftentimes the folks who are like more kind of the volume part of your business that are getting the good deal by headcount, there's many more of them than maybe your a clients where you're like, boy, if I just had 20 more of these, it would change my life and it would be a vastly easier firm to run. And so if we just sit back and we let any old referral come in the door, what I've found is that my client list will actually trend towards a type of client that I don't want. If you still have legacy clients on your client list, which I could tell you just about every text message, every email that I get, in fact, we go out and we run these live workshops and I say show of hands, who's still got legacy clients on the client list they don't know what to do with, 80% of the hands go up. As long as you have those people on your client list who love you and are not even necessarily the people that complain about fees, but you're just serving them begrudgingly because you're like, those are like the rates I was charging 10 years ago. Those people, they may love you because you're great, but they may also love you in addition to that because they know they can't get a better deal anywhere else. And those folks, they'll tell their friends about it and before you know it, you got a whole bunch of those people kicking down your doors. So what's the move then? You just get intentional about what clients you want referrals from and what clients you don't. And you don't set the expectation that like just because someone else opened a little velvet rope thing for their friend that they will necessarily get in. Like, like it's not a bygone conclusion, that if somebody invites someone to join the firm, that it will just instantly be a yes. So this means we have to proactively, first of all figure out who are a clients are, who are the clients that we want more of. But then not be afraid to go to them and be like, hey, here's the thing is we are doubling down on clients just like you and we're looking to add a few more this month. Is there anybody in your network that this could make sense for? Or tell me where are they hanging out? What are the lunches, what are the get togethers, what are the conferences? Tell me where I should be to find more of those people. And you'll find like these, if these are cool people, they're more than happy to help you out. Like they're more than happy to make those connections. We get afraid to ask. Just as adults, we're, we're very bad at asking for things in general. And even if you take this to the worst possible scenario where the client's like, well that's a weird thing for them to ask me. They need, they need business or something. That person that you imagine in your head, that person's probably just a jerk. Like that's not the type of person you want to work with anyways. So what are we really afraid of? So referrals, what to do? Market to them basically have, have like really compelling stuff about you so that when they come and they explore potentially working with you, they see that you exist and you are reputable. But what not to do, don't just let them refer to you willy nilly because this can actually get your client list to trend in the wrong direction. Now let's talk about generalist referrer, referers versus specialist refers. Another trap here is the person that's sending your client your firm work is financial advisor, the attorney, the whoever that is in the community that you've made some sort of connection with. You Send them some stuff and they send you some stuff. This is a great way to get a firm off the ground. And it may be how you built your client list the first time, but it suffers from some of the same issues that we just talked about with your C and D clients before, where they will send you anything and everything. And if kind of the job of accounting firm leadership is to lead an accounting firm in a more specific direction because it's easier to build a sustainable and profitable firm the more specific the type of people you serve and, and wherever, wherever you're at on that spectrum of specificity, you could be super niche, you could be super general. Our job is really just to, to keep inching it down that spectrum to be a little more specific. And it never ends. Like a niche firm is not a binary thing where either you're niche or you're not. It is that there's probably always another step you could take to be even more specialized and even more in demand and be able to command even more premium what you do. By the way, the more you do that, the more flexibility and capability you have to help people who super, super need help and have no money to pay for it. But if we are getting all of our clients from generalist refers, then they are just sort of peppering that client list with whatever they're doing right now. The opportunity here is to find specialist refers. A really easy version of this is if you only do tax or if you only do books, find the peanut butter to your jelly. If you are trying to work with streamers and you're a bookkeep, find the tax shop that only works with streamers. That's a thing. There's a bunch of them. If you want to just do tax work for hobby shops, find the bookkeepers that only work with hobby shops. They exist. Similarly, you have more other people in kind of the professional services space that are beginning to specialize. So you'll even find attorneys. Like the attorneys that we work with only work with online creators. If I were trying to build a tax shop for online creators, I'd be looking for attorneys who support the same profile. And even if I don't have that client list today, if I know something I want to get to, then build those relationships with the people who can help you to build that next client list of your dreams. As long as we are buddied up with the folks who are kind of sending us anything and everything with the expectation that we'll always say yes, then they're kind of digging you into a Deeper hole right now. One thing we don't talk about enough is just what an opportunity it is to be able to send clients, like not great fit clients to other accounting firms. So a lot of these problems that we're describing are solved by having a network of other accounting firms you can send this work to. Because oftentimes the reason we say yes is that we feel bad saying no. But if you have an even better home for that client than yourself, then that is a. That is a no. That can still feel like a yes because you're truly sending them to a better. A better destination. So let's say you got a wealth management person that's just sending you a whole bunch of 1040 work. You meet somebody who's building their firm and wants to do volume 1040 stuff, or right now they're just. They're open to it because they're building their client list for the first time. Awesome. That that is going to be a great client for that individual, whereas it may not be a great client for you anymore. And I truly believe that if more accounting firms had a network of other accounting firms that they trusted that were at different stages where they could send clients to those firms and kind of pay it forward a bit. I'm not talking about, like, selling parts of your client base. I'm saying this lead comes in not really a great fit for me. I'm going to send it downstream or I know I got to get rid of some of these clients. Let me find a really good home for them, because that's maybe a better outcome for the client than just cutting them loose into the wild. I truly believe if more firms had a great network like this, it would be easier for us to get rid of the clients that we know we need to get rid of faster. You're either at your best or you're not. Like, that client is either the apple of your eye or they are not. Let's not fool ourselves into thinking that the client that we still begrudgingly serve is getting our best. Like, they're just not. And so referrals within accounting firms can be very powerful. This is. I mean, this is the fastest way to build a new client list, is find some firms who trust you will do good work. Because just about every single accounting firm has clients on their client list that they would happily get rid of. They just don't know how to. They just haven't brought themselves to. But it makes it a lot easier if they feel really good about you and they have someone they can trust. If you're on the other side of that equation and you're somebody trying to build a client list for the first time. The really hard thing is getting any accounting firm to actually listen to you and like to, to somehow cut through the noise. Because accounting firms are subject to so much inbound from everyone and their mom. And it is truly very hard to know someone who's legitimate from someone who isn't. In fact, I was talking with somebody the other day and they were like, can you tell me, like, for someone that's trying to do sort of partnership referral stuff with accounting firms, what's just the best way to get their attention? This was in the, in a local context. They're just trying to like get connections with the other firms in town. And I'm like, if you're talking local, it's dumb to say, but I mean, nothing speaks to accountants like food. Like it. I mean that's, it's a tale as old as time. There's a reason that it's worked for decades. Send that food basket on over with you know, a little, a little note with kind of like almost like a ransom note with like the cutout magazine letters. It's like there's more where this came from. If you give me a call at xyz, that stuff works with accountants that have like physical offices. Does that work with remote accounting firms? I don't know. I've never. My accounting firm, we had, we had an office and the tax team was all on site and then the cast, the bookkeeping team that I built was distributed worldwide. I've never not had a physical office for my accounting firm. I don't know. Do people just send food baskets to your house? I imagine they do. You probably got a PO Box. What happens to your Harry and David when it goes to the PO Box man? Non us people were just really confused by that sentence. 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. 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 10 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 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 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, 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 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. Okay, so look for specialist refers who can send you just the type of clients that you want to work with. This can be the fastest way to build a totally different, much more premium client list. In addition to the stuff we always talk about here, like consultants, every single industry has consultants. They're working really hard to build an audience that are the same people that you want to be in front of. Let's find a way to offer some sort of value to those consultants. That consultant could be like, hey, I found a tax pro that just works with taxidermy shops and they're going to come and tell us you know all this stuff and you ask them any questions and their hourly rates 300 bucks an hour. So this is this valuable thing that I can offer to my consulting clients. Like, we have expertise that's in demand, so we can come to these people who are the connectors, the hubs, and offer them something of value. And before you know it, you're getting put in front of a whole bunch of people that are like your perfect client, right? So look at consultants, look at influencers, look at publications, look at membership bodies. We're going to talk about an accounting firm's website in a minute here. Do you want to look impressive to a certain type of client? Think, what are the organizations that they look up to and respect? How do I get those logos on my website? Maybe I can join some sort of committee or something like that so that they're like, wow, there's a. There's a tax pro or there's a bookkeeper that's part of this community that I'm also a committee that I'm also associated with or membership body, whatever it is, that's super legit, Right? Like, that cuts through so much to see you not only talking about what they do, but to see your association with another brand or membership organization that they respect. In my content, I honestly, I will dunk on referrals quite a bit because I think the traditional approach to referrals can just kind of dig an accounting firm into the same hole that it's already stuck in, but just make it worse. Most mature accounting firms, you don't need more clients, you need better clients. Yet we continue saying yes to just the hodgepodge of stuff that's got us into the exact situation that we're in right now. And oftentimes, rather than changing the inflow and like how clients are getting onto the list, we will instead go out and hire. And we're like, oh, we just. We just need to. We just need to build a bigger team to do all this stuff. But at that point, you're just doing more, you're not doing better. And inside of an accounting firm, somebody has to be fighting back against the natural force. When a business gets bigger, communication gets harder, efficiency gets harder. Like, somebody has to be fighting back against the fact that it just gets to be more and more of a tangled mess. Unless somebody is trying to, like, nail this stuff down a little better and pump the brakes when you get pulled into that thing that's like, this isn't really in our wheelhouse. Like, this isn't the. This client looks a little bit like that C client that we've already got. Are we sure we really want to say yes to this, even though it is more money. All the past times we've said yes to more money got us into this spot today where we're maybe feeling overwhelmed and needing to find a better path forward. So I'm not a huge fan of referrals in the traditional sense. I absolutely adore, I think, what we would call something maybe closer to partnerships, where you go out to the people who are serving a very specific type of entrepreneur in the same way that you want to build those relationships, and then their client list starts to look like your client list. And that's a tremendously beneficial relationship to build because all of your marketing efforts at that point are all working together. Only thing we didn't cover here, I talked about this a bit last week. The other really, really powerful HAC here is software companies. You have companies who will create a software platform for a specific type of business, say veterinary clinics, and then go out and raise venture capital money. Something like 80 cents on the dollar of. I think it may be like series A money goes into Google Ads and meta ads and just, just marketing. Those people need to have like smart messaging and smart things to promote. They are on the content hamster wheel like everyone else, these software companies. And you can take their marketing dollars and put yourself on blast if you can be helpful to that software company. And so a really interesting way to get more specialized is to not only find an industry, but find a big software platform within that industry and partner with them and say like, hey, I'm a cpa, I'm an ea. I'm a, I'm a bookkeeper, whatever it is. And I work with this type of entrepreneur that uses this software platform. And that company will so happily put you on blast and bring you out to conferences and even put you on stage if you want, at like sponsored stage talks. And you will ride their fundraising rounds to vastly greater awareness for you and what you're doing. I know a few people, this doesn't work more than it works, but I know a few people who are on like the partner directories for these niche softwares. Like you think about like the QuickBooks Pro Advisor program, right? That's kind of a general one where they're going to throw a whole bunch of bookkeeping professionals up there. But I've heard a few stories of folks in specific verticals where you've got these niche software platforms that will do something similar, where they have a partner directory and they will put a list of accountants on there. There are firms where they're they're getting more inbound than they can possibly handle from those directories. And the leads, like they're not bad if you already have in common. Well, they're in the industry that you want and they're using the core platform, the software platform that you want them to be using. Then straight out of the gate. That's a pretty darn good lead. Right. So oftentimes a great hack here for thinking through referrals and who the best referrer referring sources are. Oftentimes they could be software companies. Companies. But how do you start swinging the boat in that direction just to get a little bit more specific? It probably starts with how you talk about what you do. Right? Like, like I don't know. What sort of stuff do you have on your website? Today we are looking at a real life accounting firm website who's considering some changes. Let's get into it. My website, I gotta steer clear of saying anything super identifying about this firm because what I don't want is you to like run out and dunk on it or something like that. That's definitely not the goal here. But this individual did volunteer to have their firm roasted or their website roasted. I'm thinking, I'm thinking about changing the whole roast packaging to coach. I know it's not as fun, it's not as exciting, but it's also less scary. Like coach, affirm coach my tech stack, coach my website, stuff like that. I don't know. I'm thinking about it. Are we losing our edge around here? You tell me. Okay. This is a podcast and most of the listeners are audio format. Let me read for you some of this copy and I think you'll be able to visualize exactly what we're looking at here. Here's the hero copy at the top of the website. Life is taxing your business. Shouldn't be catchy, right? Okay. They've got a big picture of kind of the core team members. Great. Like we're seeing some faces of the actual people at the firm. But I want you to listen to the rest of this copy and see how it lands with you. Like pretend that you are shopping for an accounting firm. Check out this copy. Where numbers meet heart and small businesses feel at home at firm name. We're more than just a tax and accounting firm where you're behind the scenes partners, your business cheerleaders and your go to crew when things get complicated. We're a family owned team with deep roots in the community and a big heart for small businesses. Whether you're just getting Started growing fast or simply trying to stay sane during tax season. We're here to make your life easier or one number at a time. I'll give you a little bit more. We handle the financial side so you can focus on what you do best. You didn't start your business and get buried in spreadsheets and payroll headaches. Good news. We did. Yeah, we're a little weird like that. From tax prep and bookkeeping to big picture business guidance, we're in your corner with dependable support and a human touch. We're not just number crunchers. We're people. People with grit, honesty, and a whole lot of heart. Here's what you can expect when you team up with us. No confusing jargon. Do real talk and smart solutions. A partner you can count on all year long, not just during tax season. Innovative tools that keeps your business, your finances running smooth. A local team who cares about your success. Like it's personal. Because it is. There's a lot of lines that are like, oh, that's nice, that's nice. But are you. Are you hearing maybe what. What sticks out to me here is when you hear. Just all feels a little vanilla, right? That entire. All of that copy that I just read, you could copy and paste that to just about any tax and accounting firm there is. Like, as long as they're willing to serve local clients. Isn't that kind of everyone? And I would say this is a, this is an example of an accounting firm website that is trying to win on aesthetics. And aesthetics is not just what you see, but it's how you feel when you read the copy. Where numbers meet heart. And small businesses feel at home. And I think it's always worth considering when you're building your website, what biases you have that the visitor will not have. And sometimes we can put up this billboard that's us and the words that we like and the phrases that we like. And then we're like, people are gonna love this. But then we can lose perspective of the fact that, that the only way, if somebody finds this website is when they're like, kind of looking around at different providers and seeing what makes the most sense. But then ultimately, nothing about your site clearly drills into here's how we're different than the other ones and why we can provide a more compelling solution than they can. I use this example in a main channel video that we did not that long ago roasting people's websites. But if you are shopping for a landscaping services provider, you got to have somebody to mow the lawn and do all the bushes and stuff, and you go to the websites of seven of them in your town. Maybe you've done this before and you know just how soul sucking it is to try to get somebody to call you back and just feel like you've got a plan and someone you can feel good about. All these websites, like, all these landscaping websites, like accounting from websites, they look the same. But what if you went to one and they're like, yeah, at our place, we do pond stuff. Got a pond. We know how to do it. And you're like, oh, I got a pond. How likely is it that the other landscaping places know how to do pond stuff too? Pretty high. I imagine they probably know their way around a pond. But because that one website that may have looked like all the others said, hey, we do pond stuff, you're going to be like, oh, I got a pond, so I better call this place. This stuff is real, man. Like, and it factors in to accounting firm websites as well. And this is where the opportunity lies is because 95% of accounting firm websites are so samey are all just saying the same things. You're literally upon stuff away from just having that little bit of specificity that makes you stand out from all the other options. And the great news is that specificity is the same thing that will make your business vastly easier to run because you're not. Like, every client isn't something new. This special snowflake, the type of client you've never served before, they end up looking a lot like the last one. And so that landscaping place, they're like, yeah, somehow we've collected all the places in town that have ponds. And so we've actually gotten really good at pond stuff when we built a. A partnership with a landscaping designer where they do like, cool, elaborate pond stuff. They're now the pond place. That's. That's a more interesting landscaping business to run than the one that's just like trying to compete on, I don't know, volume. Okay, back to the website. The job of your website at the end of the day is not to show a client anything and everything you can ever do to do for them, but to just get them to take a single next step. When I look at their landing page here, me book a call. Color wise, it's the same color as most of the hero website. Normally you want your call to action on your website to be like a contrasting color. So it really stands out. In this case, a lot of the stuff on the landing page is gray and the button is Also gray, so it doesn't really jump out. They've got some testimonials on here on the landing page, which is great. Better than nothing. But they all talk about like, I worked with this specific person. They were great. I worked with that specific person. They were great. Trouble is, if someone's coming into the firm, they don't know if they're going to get that person or not. So the better testimonial is actually the one that rather than talking about the firm talks more about who they are and what they need. It's because if, if somebody visiting the site can see, oh, that's a person just like me, then that testimonial means a lot more. So if, if this testimonial instead was something along the lines of, we were just about to open our second vet clinic and we're super overwhelmed, it was in a different state. We had this issue, that issue, and they helped us through it. That to me is much more interesting than we've been with this firm for a long time. The firm is filled with great people who know all about taxes and are a pleasure to work with it. Next one amazing team who cares about helping their clients. Highly recommend Next one. My, my husband met this person at a business networking meeting more than 10 years ago. They've been our tax and accounting service provider for business and blah, blah, blah. All very generic. Right. So can we get to a more. A more tailored version of that? And again, doesn't like. We're not like burning the ships and going super, super niche here. That's not step one. You only really get very specific in your messaging when it's clear that this is a better, more profitable path forward for your firm. And it doesn't even mean that you don't still have general clients on the client list. Like your website is where you find your next client. It's not for all the clients that you already have. So don't be afraid to take it just in a little bit more targeted of a direction like this one. I mean, it could literally just say like, size of the business is there size that's too small. This is maybe the most common stage that most accounting firms are at. Or is like we work with one to $5 million small businesses. That's great. It's better than nothing. But there's so many steps beyond that where we can go even further. That's probably the next step for this firm is to, to call out the size and, or the industry or industries that they like working with. Couple other things I'LL call out about this site. They have an about page, which is fine. I think I'm less into about pages than a lot of people are because I think we already struggle with our websites being centered on us rather than centered on who we're great for. Like, I want to be telling the stories of the people who we've helped because the people visiting the site will then see those stories and identify with them. Them. If I just tell my story, they're not going to identify with that. Like, they may be interested in learning my background or something like that. But at the end of the day, people are selfish. Like, assume that everybody is only coming here to learn. What can you do for me? And so the most important thing is to communicate. Like, hey, if you're in this situation, this situation or this situation where for you. And they're like, oh, sweet. Like somebody. Somebody that does pawn stuff. Now they have got an option at the top of their website called services. And I am generally anti services. Services end up being a competition of who can. Who can put the longest list of things that our clients don't understand as to make us look like bigger experts. It's another example of us kind of being like, too fixated on what we do and how we talk about what we do, particularly as people just. Clients don't understand that stuff. They don't know what estate planning is. Like, they don't know the things that we are listing there. Our websites are generally written in accountant, which is a language that the people visiting our website don't speak. And as. As counterintuitive as this may sound, and as hard as this may be to do, the best words for your website are actually the words that your potential leads, like your next client will use, not your words. You may not even like those words. But we're not trying to impress ourselves or our peers with our website. We're trying to speak to the next type of client that we want to bring through the door. And they almost certainly don't use the same language that you do. So this last fall, we did 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 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. 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 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, 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, 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 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 if you go to this firm's services page, they present three packages. One starting at 4:30amonth, another starting at 7, 10amonth, another starting at 12:50amonth. And the trouble with doing this is when people will start their journey and book a call, they will look at one of these packages and they'll be like, yeah, I'm thinking this one. And they will think that what they need is pretty much the minimum. Because we present these packages at the minimum price. But then we list a whole bunch of these impressive things under it. If anything, they're seeing things listed under here that they're like, I don't think I even need that. So I might. I mean, you say it's the minimum. I might be less than the minimum because I don't actually need some of these things you list. But I can tell you what they're not thinking when they see these numbers is that the price you're going to quote them is two or three times the minimum. And this is just always the problem with putting any sort of minimum on your website. The person will then price, anchor and expect their price to be pretty much what the minimum is, when in reality we should. We shouldn't be taking new clients in anywhere near the minimum. Like, a healthy firm is increasing fees so much year over year that if you let somebody in the door at the minimum a few years ago, you probably don't want to be serving them. Now your minimum, that is like the drop dead threshold where our legacy clients just can't go below that. It's not the number we're going to put on a website. So the thing I much prefer doing on the website is giving examples of clients that we love that we're working with right now, not sharing like the actual client's name unless you get permission to do this, and saying what sort of range they would expect to pay for this sort of engagement. And that range, like that number ought to be representative of kind of the average in my client base or like the what I want the fee to be for the next client we let in the door, which might be like a CFO client rather than a once a year tax client. So on your website you're able to craft the reality of here's the next type of client that we want. And the power of telling that story is that the right person who comes along and sees it will see themselves in that story and then realize, okay, I have that problem right now. They're actively solving this for other people just like me. Therefore this is the shop for me me. But if all we do is put some numbers up here and we say this is the minimum price and then list a whole bunch of like accountant services under it, then we're somehow expecting the person visiting the website to know what services they need and don't need, when really it's us that are probably most qualified to tell them that. And it feels like they're like walking up to a menu rather than an expert who can tell them, here's what you really need and what you don't need. That's, that's just always been my objection to letting the client select into services at all. Like I let my clients select into how premium they want the service delivery to be, not the services themselves. Because who knows better what the services should be than you? And the moment you ask the client to make that decision, in my mind we are admitting that we're like trying to get them to buy as much as possible whether they need it or not. Otherwise why would I be even giving them that option? Why would I even be putting it in front of them? Right. The last option on their NAV at the top is called Client Hub. The top option is Client Portal and it takes you to a Firm360 login page. Great. Firm360 is a practice management. Second one is Payroll takes them to a paylocity login. So like a, just a whole other portal is the Second option, the third option is monthly insight calls. So, so this looks like like a one to many sort of webinar they run every single month, which is super cool. I love that. It is another thing that is super valuable, the more targeted it is. But it's very hard to make generally useful, right? Like if you have generalist clients and you say, hey, hey, let's all hop on this webinar once a month, it's so, so hard to make it useful for those people. But if it's a whole bunch of vet clinics who are using this core software in their vet clinic, if you get 12 of those people on a call, or even four of those people on a call, they're going to be jacked. They're going to be like, oh my gosh, what do you guys do for this? What do you do for this? What do you do for that? So the more specific it is, the more useful that call becomes. Only other thought is the, the intake process on this website. It doesn't do any filtering. The only thing it asks for is a first name, last name, email and message. And what you really want to do, especially these days, as bots can complete your website form a hundred times in a day, you want to put some sort of filtering information there. So if you think about what makes an A client an A client, it's usually something about them, it's something about the industry that they, that they are a part of. Maybe it's something to do with the size of the business, just adding a couple few questions on that intake form. If that's all you do, it'll make it way less work to cut out the fluff, like all the folks that you actually don't want to talk to and send them down a path of like, hey, here's, here's a free resource or something like that, maybe a DIY guide so that they can at least get some value from you. Because sometimes those people will grow down the road and ultimately become clients. But you don't want to have to hop on a call with someone to learn that about them. In a perfect world, the questions that you ask give you all the information to know whether or not you actually want to get on a call with them. This website, it's an example of like a website that you look at and you're like, I like this website. Like they use a lot of great language, they look like like terrific people. But I think we can sometimes underestimate the selfishness of the people that are coming and visiting our site. And so we don't put enough effort into really explicitly showing, here's how I can make you more money or how I can really help you. And so that client. And so that lead then just bounces to the next website and they've. They've probably already forgot yours by the time there are a couple websites down the path. I've started collecting some accounting from websites that I love that I think do this stuff really well. Interestingly, I don't know if you all get ads for this. The. Who's the Shark Tank guy, the bald guy, Kevin o' Leary or something. He's evidently invested in an accounting firm and a tax firm. And I get ads for this thing nonstop. And their website is great. It is the opposite of most accounting firm websites. It's super, super ugly. There's zero aesthetic. But it is so to the point of, if you are these people, I can save you this much money on average. And it's just like ruthlessly to the point in a way that probably makes most of us uncomfortable when we see it. We're like, oh, geez. Like, this feels like I'm like I'm guaranteeing something I can't deliver on. Like, it doesn't. Like it stops short of that and sort of navigates that. But I think is a really useful foil for me to be able to say, like, look at this website and how extreme the claims are and how they talk about outcomes, like for very specific types of people. And then look at how most of us build ourselves, which is very like, kumbaya. This is a person I'd love to have a barbecue with. Reality is like, I. I think for me, the best, the best website is something in the middle where you've got elements of both of those things, some humanity coming through, but also some like, hey, here's where the rubber meets the road. We can really help you. Like, the combination of those two things is what gets me excited. But I've been collecting some of those websites. I think I'll put it out in a newsletter soon to say, like, hey, here are like five or six websites and what I love about them, them. Otherwise, these kind of coaching website videos and podcasts can sometimes be like, oh, just tell me all the things you don't like. And then maybe you don't feel like you're any closer to like, what's, what's the great version of a website? Right. If you're not on the newsletter yet, Jason, on firms.com you can subscribe to my newsletter. Planning on putting that one out in the next month or so should be a good one. What's that I hear though? You hear that? This segment is called Mail Back. The mails arrived. What was that? Was that Blues Clues? They had the whole song about the mail. Here comes the mail. It never fails. I had a younger cousin I spent a lot of time with growing up who was so into Blues Clues. I don't know why I'm pretending I don't know every word of that song. I do. We're gonna jump straight into the question that everybody wants an answer to for some reason from Matthew, Patrick. Jason, I have a very hard question. Are you wearing an Apple watch on both arms? What's up with that? It is shocking the like. This is probably the thing I get most in comments on social media, on the Internet, just non stop. Why are you wearing two watches? Evidently it's just weird to have something on both wrists. Like that's a strange thing for folks. Let me give you a quick. Let me give you a quick walkthrough of my adornments on my right watch. What? My right wrist. I've got an Apple watch. I feel that the Apple watch is actually one of the best inventions we've had in the last decade specifically to avoid phone usage. And there's an ugly version of this. There's a hygienic version of this. The ugly version is if you look at my dad's Android across the top, you have like the. The notification bar across the top and there are icons stretching from the left hand side of the screen clear to the right hand side of the screen. And you see that and you are like, that is disgusting. What? You just. Notifications just happen and you don't do anything with them, you maniac. And you see what the notifications are and it's like. Like every single app on his phone is blasting six notifications a day out. That's gross. The hygienic version of that. As I'm sure. I'm sure we all do, right? We carefully curate what apps are allowed to send us notifications as to not perpetually distract us all day long. Ain't nobody got time for that. Okay, Don't. I'm not gonna put a hundred apps on my phone and then get 300 notifications a day. That is a mess. And then you just don't pay attention to your notifications where there might be an app where an important notification came through. Hey, car just broke down. Can you pick up the kids from school? You see that 90 minutes ago. You're like, crap. Where's my kids school. You gotta make way for the important notifications. And the Apple Watch, it is the perfect companion for the enlightened individual who does just so now I actually have certain apps that are allowed to notify my phone and then I have certain apps that are allowed to notify my watch. Those can actually be two different things things. And depending on whether it goes to my watch or whether it goes to my pocket, I know which is which. And the whole idea of the watch is for me it's the most valuable tool to reduce the number of times you take your phone out of your pocket throughout the day. And I have an entire house full of young children. That's just where I'm at right now. The first one was on purpose, the next two were not. So I, I can't be one to give you any life advice on anything in regards to that. But the thing I try to do more than anything else is be present in whatever it is that I'm doing if I'm on a meeting with the team or if I'm reading a book with a kid. And when you're an entrepreneur, you know, that is really, really bloody hard. And the deal I've made with my family is there's gonna be times where stuff comes up and I have to write it down because unless I write it down, it will be in my head and still there. And so the only times you see me engaging with tech when I am on family time is writing something down that I can't forget because then I can forget it and I can trust that it's in an Apple note and I come back to it later. Or the very select things that I allow to come through to my watch, which is like some potentially urgent stuff from the team sort of thing basically stuff. Stuff from some people in the team and then from like VIP text centers like my mom, that sort of thing. Those are the only things that are allowed to, to come through to me. And if I didn't have my watch I would have to get my phone out for every single one of those things. And I'm very mindful of my kids seeing me being on my phone at all. All. Especially if they're like telling you a thing or and you're just like disregarding them because you're on your phone. Like I can't, I can't remember who shared this story is some celebrity share the story of they told their kid as a very young kid that they weren't going to use their phone in the house anymore. And the Kid immediately started crying. They were so happy. And it was like he didn't realize until he saw the reaction to that just how much the phone had come between him and his ability to be present with his kid. The kid melted down. They were so happy for that freaking phone to go away. That's why I use an Apple watch. Although I'm thinking about doing away with it. I don't know, we'll see. The problem is I think it's going to end up in like more net phone coming out of pocket events a day. Now the big question, what's the other one? Then I made the joke up top about using two watches to track time zones. That's honestly a comment that a person made on the Internet. He travels a lot. Maybe it's so he can track multiple time zones zones and I love that guess, but it's, it's incorrect. This other thing is called a whoop. A whoop W H O O P And this company started as sort of a thing that like CrossFit Bros did and I think it's gone a little more mainstream since then. Basically think of like, you know, fitness and sleep tracking like a watch does, but like way, way better and more dialed in than like a Fitbit or an Apple watch or something like that. Whoop right now is kind of like the gold standard in tracking whatever is going on with your body through the day and through the night when you're sleeping too. It is the only sort of fitness tracker I've ever had that has actually influenced my behavior. And the biggest thing that it will change for you, I can almost guarantee it, is how you plan for your sleep and try to get better sleep. I have like an eight sleep bed thing that does sleep tracking. I've had all sorts of different sleep tracking things and a lot of folks that love the aura ring I've had nothing that has actually changed my behavior and the way that the whoop has. So I no longer drink alcohol. Super sad. I eat way earlier before bed. I drink way earlier before bed. As in fluids, non alcoholic fluids. A whole lot of things that just have my sleep way more dialed in than it's ever been before. Which by the way, if you're gonna pick a single thing in your life to optimize, it should be your sleep. It really should be. But like I can tell you exactly how much better I will sleep if I read a book for 20 minutes before I go to bed to if I eat beef in the last meal before I go to bed. Like honestly like it's crazy how good it is. And I don't like wearing two things on my wrists, but here we are. Okay, maybe I'll ditch the Apple watch. I'm kind of on the fence if you may have seen this on my newsletter. It was either last week or the week before. At the end of my newsletter I have kind of a one cool thing which is like just a fun tech gadget that I like. There is a basically like an old style ipod with like a little circly rotary thing where you slide your finger in the circle to select things. It looks like an old classic old school ipod but for the screen you slip an Apple watch into the top half of it and that's the screen. So you have this device that looks like an ipod but the screen on the top is an Apple watch and you can do the little circle rotary thing with the button to select stuff and Apple watches like you can get Apple watches with their own standalone like cellular plan. They don't even have to be connected to your phone to work. So you can get most of your notifications and all that. Which means you could have this like smaller than an old classic ipod device in your pocket and use it as a phone. People are gonna look like at you like you're a maniac. But like if you're working out or something like that, super cool. What is it called? It's called tiny pod the tinypod.com. it's super cool. Feels like just the sort of thing I would test drive for a week and a half and then never come back to it. I'm like well that's 150 bucks. I'm not getting back. Mailbag, we got more questions. We got to power through these. By the way, you want to send me a question? What we do here is basically a, basically a free accounting firm consulting practice. So send me an email. Jasonasononfirms.com Send me a DM on social media platforms. Drop a comment under the YouTube version of this podcast or send me a text at 1-516-980-4968. Actually send me a voicemail. Send me a 30 second or less voicemail because that's just more fun than a text. Okay, next up, Bankroll dropped a dropped a comment on that last AI podcast that we did last week. Said anybody want to start messing with this stuff? Stuff together. Stats fanboy here and looking for like minded peeps. Whoever liked it, please find me. We've had some really cool stuff start in the comments of the podcast from like communities of new firm owners like that stuff just happens. If you're willing to like go wade into the comments. The comments under our stuff are actually pretty cool. For the podcast, not for the main channel YouTube videos, that's those ones get the weirdos but the commenters for the podcast. Honestly a pretty cool crew. Somebody share something like this, pop in and reply like before you know it you're hanging out on a zoom with with a like minded person. If you are mega into the AI stuff, I should say Chad Davis who we've had on the podcast a number of times, big time tech nerd, runs a pretty good sized accounting firm. He runs an online community called Automation Town Automationtown IO. It's a community of basically AI champions from account firms and agency owners. Like agencies that do automation stuff for accounting firms. There's a bunch of them in there as well. So it's like pretty much the bleeding edge of like all this custom built how people are building their own things to solve their own firm's automation headaches. Super cool community. Stupid. Cheap, way too cheap. Automationtown IO Worth checking that out if you're a big time AI nerd. 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 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 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 Missive 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. 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. It's that time of year, the time of year where your hosted tax software starts grinding to a just to a halt because everybody's trying to use their computers at the same time. This is because when you host your apps with most providers, like your tax software provider, the servers you're accessing, they're shared servers. Everybody and their mom are logging into those things, trying to get stuff done at the same time. The solution is today's sponsor, Verito. Man, Verito is going to give you your own private server where all your tax stuff, even any hosting needs, QuickBooks, desktop, whatever you got, it's hosted on a server that only you're accessing. So it doesn't matter how many people are hammering that server, the only people hammering it are you. It's easier than it sounds to get started that can actually transition you in just a weekend. And especially as we're heading into busy season, gang, this is the time to do it. Bardo. Vastly cheaper than the hosting you get from your tax software provider and faster. Like kind of a no brainer. Now Verito can also do your whisp, that little security thing you gotta do if you do tax work in the us they can also be your entire IT department. In fact, the cost of hosting your IT apps and them being your IT department is less than Thomson Reuters Virtual Office. Know a lot of people that are very happy Verito users. In fact, the average response time from Verito Support if you come to them with an issue is now less than 60 seconds, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Like I said, now's the time to do it before we get too far into busy season. To learn more about Verdo, check out the link down in the Show Notes. I wanted to pull up this recent comment on an old video around email delegation. The comment, the gist of the comment basically being it's too expensive to pull an assistant in to help with my email management and everyone like there's gonna be people that hear that and they're like that's a joke. And other people who will hear that and be like, yeah, no, that's where I'm at Like, I don't have the money to hire somebody to help me with my email, but everybody, regardless of where they're at on the spectrum of being an entrepreneur, we all assign different values to our own time. Time and that, like, that's just. That's universal. And you will continue to evolve and you will assign a different value to your time. But the one common theme you will see with people who are very fast growth and fast at delegating things and all that is they're seemingly more capable of betting in them, betting in themselves, and valuing their time at a higher level, Right? And so. So how do we even think of how to value our own time? Because what most of us do is if we're gonna do any hiring, it's just to do more. Like, it's hiring for growth. It's not hiring for you. And what you do, big old hiring trap you. You keep adding to the client list and you can't handle it all. And so you hire somebody to just serve more clients, right? And then you hire somebody else to serve more clients, right? All you're doing is you're giving yourself more jobs, because normally you're not getting out of all the client work at that point. Now you just have two more people to manage. And at a certain point, you never hire for the stuff that you do when at the end of the day, in a business whose time is more important than that of your own? So especially in the example of email delegation, this is probably the cheapest hire that you can ever make inside of an accounting firm. This could literally be like a fractional virtual assistant if you really wanted. But I would push you. Nobody's going to value your time. Like. Like is one of those things where only you can see it, where you have to advocate for the value of your own time, otherwise nobody else will. And for most of us, the value of your time over the course of your career will grow insanely. Like, you would not guess what it would be worth 10 years from now. So are you willing to make the bet on yourself right now that if you pulled that person in, even though that hourly rate is like, oh, am I even worth that? Are you willing to make a bet on yourself now that if you pull that person in that you're worth, the next way that you can spend your hours will actually be worth even more? Because normally when we hire, the hire is supposed to unlock some future opportunity. You may not see the money in the bank right now for that hire. The entire idea behind making that hire is this is an investment that I'm pretty sure is going to take us to here. But if we're never willing to do that, and to be clear, you got to have a plan for the downside. What happens if it doesn't work out? It can't be this totally YOLO thing. Scary decisions like that, honestly, they will live and die by how well you plan for the downside. What if it doesn't work? Because you still have to have a plan if it doesn't work. And then once you do, kind of takes the fear out of it, right? But if you're not able to make that ROI calculation and that investment in yourself like nobody else would, and you can, nobody else will and you can end up stuck in this spot where your life is the same task just lived on repeat. Like at the end of the day, we are the things that we do every day, which oftentimes does not align with how we would describe our identities. There's so many things on those lists that we're not really proud of, but we're still doing them day after day, week after week. And 12 months from now, my wish for you would be that the things that you're doing every day are different than they were 12 months ago. But in order for that to happen, there has to be somewhere for those tasks. Tasks to go. And I love automation as, as much as the next guy. But the answer to that is usually other talented humans. It's usually new boundaries and, and they're just being things where it's like 12 months ago I would have been willing to do that. Now I'm no longer willing to do that. So something feels too expensive. Know that too expensive is usually a fleeting thing. It's something that is not always the case. It may feel too expensive with where you are right now. And in a situation like that, oftentimes the right thing to do isn't to blame the solutions cost. It's rather to look at what would have to be true for this to not be too expensive for me. And so if that assistant got me back 10 hours in my week, what would have to be true in the way that I spent those next 10 hours for it to be taking me on a better path. Like don't, don't go out to the world and get them to make that argument for you. Right? Like it's up to you to be like, like, oh, I'm thinking about doing a practice management system for the first time, but that's going to cost this much money. That feels like a lot. How would that be still like a awesome win for us and how do we get there? Like, that's how I overcome that. I don't look at it and be like that's too much and then stop and then go back to the status quo. There's going to be some stuff where that is the case. I mean, the ultimate source of truth is always what are other people doing and what are they finding success with. And then seeing a reality in their circumstances that you want to become. Your reality. That is the fun of meeting people is the things that are normal for them can become normal for you once you've spent enough time with them. But that's hard, right? Like, do we feel like we have permission to ask them questions, hang out with all them? That's tough. But that's the value of like having these relationships with other people that do accounting firm stuff. I love this one. From somebody that's thinking about going all in on a tax firm for the first time. I'm contemplating increasing my tax help business from a few small commitments to a handful of clients that I can easily manage. I've been preparing taxes for a few family members for several years. Sounds like Drake would be a great option. Price being my major concern. In the past, I've used Taxact, but costs are increasing with them. What would you recommend? Cost being the biggest factor for someone trying to build a small business around tax consulting and preparation, you're on the right track. Drake. Probably Taxact has a Taxact Pro product. If you're comfortable with that, especially when you're first starting out, like you're just doing 1040s personal tax pro work, that's fine. I'd say the bigger thing to drill into in this question is cost being the biggest factor. And this actually ties nicely with, with what we really just said is it may be expensive for you today, but we got to consider what's going to make that cheap for you. It is that cost isn't the biggest factor. It is that price is the biggest factor right now. If your client list is family members and that those are the only people that are giving you money to prepare tax returns, that's a tough crowd to be able to command very premium fees for from. So yes, you got to do what you got to do when the. The money's in the bank and that that is what it is. Right. And so if you're looking for a cheap tax prep platform, Drake is almost certainly the place to start. I think they've even got pay per return like options. But this is another Great example of where there's a bunch of firms out there who are charging more premium rates than you are. And right now those rates feel completely out of reach. And this, this applies to any firm, even really big mature firms, because there is no ceiling feeling on this. There's always going to be a bigger fish that's charging more premium rates. That is further down some path that you didn't realize was an option. And the way for that to become normal for you is to learn what they do, spend time around them and you'll start to learn like the language to even be able to talk about that and have the confidence to present yourself in a way where you can even command that sort of fee. Because it's not real for you until it is. And usually the best way to make it real for you is to see in the other people for whom it's real, what are they doing and how do I spend more time to kind of like absorb those vibes from them. Right. Couple more left here. Waiting to see the list of cities for your Jason on Firm's live tour. When are we getting that? Hoping to see some more smaller alternative cities. We should have dates and cities out this week, peeps. In fact, I would love in the very next podcast episode to be able to share those dates and cities with you. We'll share the dates and cities, but it's probably another couple of weeks before the ticketing page goes live because with that there's a bunch more work I just want you to be able to get to save the date up. And then we're building out the landing pages and kind of the registration need to get that to the point where it's actually gathering all the information that we need at the time of sign up. Anyways, that's a bit more work to build out, but hoping to have the cities and dates out soon. They're all happening in May and June. Twenty cities in the United States. I'm sorry, Toronto. We did a dinner in Toronto last year that was wild. The number of people that turned out for it. We had to cap it at like 120 people after like a couple few days. Trouble is with this 20 city series, the reality is with these workshops is we are in and out in a day and to the next city in the next day. Which means the day itself has to be very tight. Like I'm, we're getting up at 6am, hitting the road. Then we're in another city hosting people by noon. And then that event runs until about 9pm and then you wake up at 6am the next day, you do the next city. We do this for 20 cities. So like all the logistics that we're moving 10 to 12 people from city to city. So all the logistics that go into that, obviously it's a lot, but it means the incremental logistics of each city can't be that much. And so doing a single city in Canada is just such a bigger lift. I would love to do something in Toronto later this year, but it's probably just going to be somebody else's event that I come and help co host or something like that, that. But for our workshop tour, which is our own like the events that we put together ourselves that I'm most proud of that frankly, people had an awesome time at last year. Like we, we asked for feedback afterwards and it was like an average of like 9.1 out of 10 like people had a great time, said they were gonna come back, managed to lose, I'll just say well over 100 grand running those 14 events. And so we said, you know what we should do is do even more of them bad at making money, but hope to have all those cities and dates out in, in days. Two more here. I want to start my own firm, but I only have 16 months of experience and a degree. Is that enough? It depends on the type of work that you want to get into. But also know that at this stage you may not know what you love yet. And so in the small firm Averse, there is generally going to be firms that, firms that are primarily focused on bookkeeping, on tax work, on CFO work and sometimes on audit work. Although for small firms usually it's going to be more specialized audit like employee benefit plan audits, that sort of thing rather than auditing big companies. And until you've gotten the taste of all those different colors of the rainbow, you don't necessarily know which of those things you're going to enjoy. There are some, some things I would definitely not recommend jumping into with 16 months experience. Don't go into audit with that little experience. Don't go into tax with that little experience. Bookkeeping you could potentially do. People will fight me on this and it's, it's hard for us when we have a ton of experience and expertise not to gatekeep and be like, oh, you could never do what I do. Of course they can't do what you do and you've been doing it for 20 years. But there is a way into building a bookkeeping practice with, with very little experience. The best way to do that is serving a very specific type of business because you'll learn so fast how best to help that type of business. But also don't discount the value of learning how to do that on somebody else's dime. Now, most firms, especially most US Firms, the bar is very, very low. They are not great places to work. But there are so many people that tune into this content that are running amazing, super cool modern firms. And I wouldn't want you to miss out on the opportunity to have a peek into just how folks are doing that and learning. Like, is that something that's for me. Some people though, you're just so entrepreneurially minded that you're like, I'm gonna do my own thing. It like it's just a matter of time. And that's where like starting with a side hustle probably makes sense. Just know like, if you get into tax, you get into audit. Very hard to do that stuff in a vacuum because you don't know what you don't know. But great job being here. And like you're learning like just by being plugged into the podcast, you're learning a tremendous amount. And if you can find some other people that are doing the same thing. Logan Graph runs an online community for people who are just starting their own firms. It's called Counter. Website is Countercommunity Co. The more people you have that you can talk with that are on a similar journey, the more confidence you'll have in doing that. Last one, would you say Claude is as safe as the paid Chat GPT plan? So Claude the chat assistant from Anthropic. It's kind of been all over the headlines the last couple months. They've been just crushing it with some really good new AI models. Claude spelled C L A U D E if you haven't used it IT My understanding is all the products that fall under Claude for work come with AICPA Sock 2 Type 2 certification and your inputs are never trained into the model, which is kind of the same bar that the ChatGPT business plan set. So in the current Claude naming, which is kind of confusing, Claude team, it's either team or teams is kind of the small business plan that sits under that Claude for work umbrella. And I would say, although I also tell people, don't take security advice from a YouTuber, run this by your IT support. But by and large, security level for Claude is about the same as it is for ChatGPT. Comparing the Claude team plan with the ChatGPT business plan and also Claude code, Claude cowork some of the exciting new stuff we've been talking about. That all sits under Claude for work as well, so same sort of security stuff applies to those tools also. So we got through it. Hey, it was great to see you today. Thanks for coming and hanging. You got stuff you're thinking about, you got questions, drop that stuff in the comments, send me a message, drop me a voicemail. Would love to hear from you. I've been enjoying this new format, kind of these three chunks. Let me know what you think and don't be a stranger. I'll catch you in the next one.