578 This DATA Proves The Value Of Your Accounting Firm

Today on the podcast, how do we prove the value of what our accounting firm does? After all, we're all just shouting these claims on our website, but how do we present data to potential clients that proves gang, these are the outcomes that we are getting people? It will absolutely ramp up the effectiveness of anything you put out into the world if we can measure just how much we help people. I'm going to give you six ideas for just how to do that. But also I got a story for you. The story of an accounting firm who grew to 175 grand in revenue their very first year and is set to do 2:30 the next year. I'm going to tell you how they did it. A few good ideas here that any firm can swipe. But having talked with many firms in a similar situation, I can tell you where the traps for a firm like this can start to rear their heads. This is actually, this is actually a fun one good opportunity for you to kind of put your own coaching hat on and be like, yeah, how would I advise this accounting firm? And then we're getting into the mailbag today. Questions like, what are the best ways I can hire an AI agency to come work with my accounting firm? Couple people sharing hard tech stack decisions. Do I go with this app or that app? I'll give you the real, real what Those companies don't tell you about some features that don't quite stack up. And is there any limit to how much you can raise fees on clients year over year if the last couple of years you gave them a pretty good bump. Going to talk about it. Come on in gang. Grab a chair, scoop. Okay, if you're new here, welcome to the Jason on Firms podcast where we talk all things accounting firm stuff. My background is in running accounting firms. I was a tax preparer from the ripe young age of 18 years old, went on to build a bookkeeping practice. And the people that tune into this podcast bless them about 1500 accounting folk per day. We do it just to get a little bit better at doing accounting firm stuff. Whether you run a firm, whether you work at a firm, we share a bunch of ideas of the cool stuff that people are doing and how we can make our firm just a little bit better each day. And we're going to start with something that we see a lot, not a lot, but something that we see some other accounting firms doing in the wild. And sometimes when we see it, we're like, that's wrong. That's dumb. That's not true. If you think about companies like oh, who is that company that is doing all the marketing that basically is just like, we're a productized tax firm and you're going to save on average X tens of thousands of dollars by switching to an S corp. What were they called? I can't remember. If you get ads in your social media feeds for these sort of accounting firms or productized accounting firm services, what you very commonly see is the average client saves XYZ like real dollars. And if you come and work with us, we're probably going to get you that money back. And, and you see that crap and you're like, man, that's kind of messed up. Like, you can't guarantee that, can you? And the truth is like, no, but the devil's in the details of how we communicate this. And the reality is right now for I'll give you the, the answer for tax shops, but also the answer for bookkeeping shops and then some examples of what each can do to employ something like this in a way that we can feel okay about. But the reality is the advertising that will always work best is, hey, you can come give me $1 and I'm going to give you $2. The copy around like extens of 1000s of dollars of savings like that is just. There is nothing juicier than that, the potential of like getting money, manifesting this money that you didn't think that you were entitled to. And so that's what you see front and center on like most of the advertising, at least on paid ads that you see for accounting firms. So what would it look like to do a version of this that you feel okay with? Acknowledging that there is a line and, and the line's probably going to be a little bit different for everybody. But I think there's probably a way that we can each like walk up to that line, find the most performant version of this copy for us and it land better with prospects than our websites that are just like a bunch of copy and no proof, right? Like, we have to be able to present proof. It's vastly more compelling if we can measure how we are helping people. So let me give you six ideas for how you could potentially do just that. This is the sort of stuff you could use in ads if you wanted, you could use on your website or even just share anecdotally as you're talking with prospects about how you help folks. Let's start with a bookkeeping example. Number one, you could measure the FTE reduction in the time a company spends on bookkeeping back office sort of Stuff. So my bookkeeping practice, or cash practice, whatever you want to call it, the way we were set up is we were kind of an accounting department in the box. And we could come into a company and be like, tell us who you got right now on the bus that's doing accounting or accounting adjacent stuff. And we could tell them, here's all the work that we're going to take off of those people's plates. And you can repurpose what they're doing to be, you know, more around sales enablement or something that will ultimately drive profits for the business. But our big breakthrough in building that practice was when we could get clients to view the services we were providing them with as FTE replacements. Not, not quote, unquote bookkeeping. Now we were doing at the end of the day, much more than bookkeeping. We were doing controllership. We're doing bill pay, payroll. We were supporting their employees directly when they get a pay stub and they're like, hey, what's this thing here? We're like, just ask, we'll help you out. So we were really were functioning as that accounting department in a box. And when we could go to the owner and be like, you could either go out and try to hire an accountant who will be able to do some of this. They'll cost you 6,75 grand a year all in. They won't do the work anywhere near as well as us. They can't tell you what the right tools to use are. And then you have to manage that person and give them a place to work. Or you can pay us six grand a month, cost will be about the same and you'll get a way higher quality of service. No business owner is excited to manage an accountant. They just aren't. And so if we can lean into that and be a part of that, that person's sort of strategic planning, we where they're like, okay, this person, they're going to go away. And, and they were doing some of these tasks. Maybe I could just push that off to. My accounting firm now had a lot of examples of that of like a person that would retire. And they're like, well, they do these things. Who will do them now next? And we just started collecting all of these sort of accounting and accounting adjacent tasks because we were doing a great job and we became this bottomless resource for the company. And to be clear, like, the best engagements will always look like this. We, we talk about scope creep sometimes as if it's this negative. Scope creep is the best case scenario. It's kind of like when you have a great employee and they end up like hoovering up all these tasks and you just keep putting more and more on them. An accounting firm that is supporting a small business, well, that's what it's going to look like. So you want scope creep because it means people are liking what you're doing and they want to give you more of it. But what would it look like to be able to put a yardstick to this, to say in the first 24 months for most of this type of company that we come in to support, on average, we take 1.7 FTEs of accounting work off their plate or something like that. That's something you could absolutely measure. We need a number upfront, an estimation from them of how many FTEs does this consume right now. And then we can check in, you know, every six months or something like that to say, where are we at right now? Like, what have we taken over? And. And I think you could actually put a number to that now. You could present that as FTEs. The juicier way to present that is dollars and cents. Take some sort of average for like, what combination of expertise went into you delivering that service. What would they have otherwise had to go out and do? You know, it could be 20% of a controller's time, could be 30% of a senior accountant's time, could be 30% Of a bookkeeper's time. What would the cost of those FTEs be? That is a real number where you can come in and say, on average, we step in and save this company, you know, $105,000 a year in spend on the back office or something like that. Because we could take this work off of your plate. It looks impressive from a marketing standpoint, but also as far as framing your fees, that, I mean, that's exactly what we're trying to do, right? Like, do you want to hire another person or do you want to hire us? I don't. I don't want you to pay me bookkeeping rates. I want you to pay me the cost of what it would otherwise cost for me to go out and do this thing in house. To me, that is a totally above board way to put a number to just how much you're helping these people. A couple examples that I used that are more niche relevant. And if you're trying to work with a specific type of client, find your version of this. Because if it's actually a more specific yardstick, you know, FTEs that that applies to any business, but a more specific one is even better. So, second, one example I used when we were working with dentists, the number of hours the practice manager got back for patient stuff. Because every dentist thinks that they can hire a practice manager and task them to do the bookkeeping and the payroll and the bill pay, and you know exactly how that ends. But wouldn't it be nice if that person had more of their time to spend on patient work, on the stuff that's actually driving revenue? That's something that we can measure. We can talk to that person ahead of time and be like, how many hours a week are you wasting on this stuff? And they're like 10 to 15 hours. Great. You just freed up 10 to 15 hours of your most expensive person in the practice besides the dentist. Free them up for. For billing, for patient care and all that stuff. That's something we can actually measure. Third example, another one we did was measure how many chairside hours the dentist got back. The dentist, I mean, that that place runs by how many hours in a week can the dentist be chairside? And every minute that they're having to spend on payroll, on bookkeeping, on all of that stuff is taking money away from the business. So what does the before and after look like? Can we actually save that person some time every single week? And then they will tell you exactly what the dollar value of every chairside hour for them is. And if I'm trying to attract the next dentist, wouldn't it be nice if I could tell them, hey, I could save you 12 hours a month if you just come and work with us? They're like, that's nice. That actually equates to this many thousands of dollars. Similarly, example number four, if you got a business owner who is themselves managing this stuff right now, managing the books, running payroll, signing checks to pay bills, like, whatever that looks like. This is a question that we can ask them as we're beginning services to say, how much time do you spend on this stuff right now? And then a couple years down the line, or maybe six months down the line, you ask them again for all these things that were the things that they were doing before. How much time would you estimate that you spend on this stuff per week or per month? Now that, Delta, that is the number that we want to advertise. How would you like to spend 13 hours less per week on back office admin? That's the average for the business that comes and works with us. Now, the numbers could be a huge swing. You could have some people say two hours, some people say 30 hours a week. That's totally fine. We're talking averages. And the more specific the type of business that we're serving, the easier it is to find whatever the juiciest measurement is. Right. The one that's most exciting to them. A couple tax examples. Number five. Let's say every time you bring a new client in, you review their past tax returns. Is probably something we ought to be doing no matter what, but it's worth measuring. What is the average amount of tax savings that comes from this? Because, you know, I mean, maybe 50% of the time, maybe even a bit more, when we would get a new client and we would go back and find stuff in the old tax returns and put money in those people's pockets. But are we doing anything to communicate to potential clients that, hey, there actually might be money on the table for you? We're not guaranteeing it, but we can tell you for the last 80 clients that we brought in here was the average figure. And all it takes, actually, is a couple big wins to, like, make that average figure look pretty impressive. What you can also do is say, here's the average additional tax, because sometimes it doesn't go the way that you want it. And depending on the type of client that may make them want to work with you, it may make them not want to work with you. I. I mean, if. If there's one thing to take from this, it is that we have to be more okay, asking to share these stories. I. Most of us, our mind goes to, like, this one situation where we just absolutely hit it out of the park for a client in this astronomical way. That's a time to stop and, like, ask if you can use that testimonial or get a quote or tell that story. Most people will be totally fine with this. For some reason, it feels like we're groveling or asking for a favor. It's really hard for us to do. But most people, like, they're cool. Like, they are totally happy to help you. These stories, they're usually not that embarrassing. What, what we are blocked on is, like, us, like, we're just uncomfortable making the ask. But if you absolutely crush up for somebody, and we can all think of situations where you save somebody tens of thousands of dollars or something like that, and you sit down and you invoice them and you're like, well, I guess that's going to be $800 or I guess that's going to be $1500. Like, dang, like, that was a crazy amount of ROI that they just got. Think about that. Consider that as the price for the testimonial. I mean, you save somebody $50,000 and we're afraid to ask for a testimonial. It's 50,000 bucks in their pocket. Come on. So a lot of this is like us having to get over that. Right? All right, last example. Number six, average tax savings from the strategies that you deploy us are probably too ambiguous about the ways that we help people. Even though in our heads we have this rolodex of like 20, 30 things you normally go to that are ideas for how to save these people money. If we simply did a better job of tracking those and which strategies were deployed for which people and what the net savings of those were or tax deferrals were, we would have like a number that would actually be shareable. So whatever it is, like whatever your go tos are from retirement contributions, Augusta rule stuff, hiring children, cost savings, like whatever you're going to, we just have to measure this stuff and actually track it. In fact, you can even go back for past clients or go look at all of the most recent clients that you've added. Go back through the last 20 and you're like, okay, on 12 of these, we went back and reviewed their old tax returns. How much money did we save, folks, on average? Like, there's huge upside to measuring this maybe for the first time. Because when it comes to our marketing, the proof is in the numbers. The proof is in the data. Can we do something better than a catchy bit of copy? Because like, data, numbers that are real, that's infinitely better, and numbers that are real for a specific type of person, that's amazing. That is the holy grail, man. If you can say, hey, for this type of entrepreneur for vet clinics, the average vet clinic who works with us, they're able to have one fewer employee because we're handling so many things for them. Would you rather have one less employee to manage? Or they're saving $80,000 on back office staffing or the multi clinic orthodontist that we serve, we're saving them, you know, $110,000 in back office staffing by them working with us. Two people that they don't have to manage. Like, how do we put what we do into something that will really land with people? There's nothing wrong about that. There's for sure wrong versions of it where you take that too far. Right? But this is one of those things where if we're not able to sell ourselves in what we do, when we're going to spend more waking hours doing this stuff than anything else in our lives. I will spend more hours working this week than I spend with my children. If I don't have the guts to promote myself and speak up about what I do, then what the heck am I sinking all these months and years into? Don't be afraid to promote yourself. Like, don't get stuck on this virtue signaling thing of, like, I'm just humble and happy to have what I have. No, go out and help as many people as you can and don't be shy about it. Being an entrepreneur is amazing. There are so few people that are capable of that. Supporting other entrepreneurs. What an amazing calling. That's the coolest thing about working for an accounting firm is you get to go to work every single day and just talk with business owners. But if you go out in the world and you look around, there's so few of those people out there. Like, you go to work, you can need to talk to such a unique selection of folks. That is an amazing opportunity. Don't be afraid to talk about what all of those interactions have kind of like honed you into being right. Sometimes we lose perspective of, like, just how much fear and ignorance there is around what goes into running a small business. And we take for granted just like what working with hundreds of entrepreneurs turns us into and the confidence we have that other people don't have. Like, you look at, you look at CFO's company goes out to hire a CFO. How many companies has that CFO worked with before? Like, unless they've run a fractional CFO practice, not very many. They don't have a very big breadth of experience and they haven't seen into all that much stuff. But in what we do, we get to see so many things. That's so cool. Quit hiding it under a bushel basket. Is that what it is? A bushel basket? I've never understood that. Like, was there a basket that the bushels got put into and then somebody had a light and they're like, no, no, no, no, no, no. Cover it up. What are you going to cover it up with? Grab me that bushel basket. I've never understood that. Hey, real quick, are you tired of fist fighting all these stupid banking logins that your client gives you? And then you got to 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 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. It 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, Sorban, it is at the top of my leaderboards for really good solutions for this. So if you don't have that yet, here's what I want you to do next. Pull over to the side of the road, put the hazards on, get your phone out, go down to the show notes, click the link for Soraban to learn more. Hey, enough about bushel baskets. Because this brave soul they have shared with us the intimate innermost details of their accounting firm and honestly, they're crushing it. It's their very first year they did 175k top line. Second year they're gonna do around 230. Let me tell you the story about this firm. It is very, very cool. Roast a firm, roast a firm. Let's Roast a firm on Jason in this segment, we roast people's accounting firms and the most loving way imaginable. But the fun of it is we're able to all put our coach hats on and be like, yeah, let that firm over there. You need to do this, that and the other thing, which is much easier than, than looking ourselves in the mirror and being like, hey, why are you still, why still doing that? That 1040 for 130 bucks? Hmm. Why do you, why are you still doing that? Why have you not gotten rid of that person yet? Didn't you say you're going to do that like six years ago? Okay, too personal. If you too are incredibly brave like this individual and want the chance of, of just some free coaching advice about your firm. We do all this stuff anonymously. I'll put a link to an intake form in the show notes where you can share some details with me about your firm and we'll just, we'll have a conversation about it and we'll all get smarter together. Okay. Okay. Here's the skinny on this firm. They do tax and VCFO work. I'm, I'm calling Bull Honky on to call it VCFO is a little bit generous. I think it's mostly bookkeeping. So they say about 30% of annual revenue is comprised of monthly vcfo work and 70% of revenue is tax prep. So 70% is one off tax work, 30% is bundled accounting and tax work. The VCFO side of things is basically bookkeeping on steroids with a tax concierge service that we sell to clients as a one stop shop for basic KPI monitoring and the client's go to source for tax questions for their business. I think you're doing bookkeeping with KPIs but by all means call it VCFO. They're based in the suburb of a tier 2 city. Decent sized city. The firms run entirely remotely. Most clients tend to be big city suburbia clients. They have no specialization. Right now the firm leans heavily on business returns and high net worth individuals. Around 60% of all tax work is business related. The team makeup. There are three peeps. One full time the owner, one part time bookkeeper and one contract seasonal preparer. So get the owner and then just a part time bookkeeper and a contract seasonal preparer. That's it. But they said they likely need more full time seasonal tax prep. What? More, more full time? Okay, so they need more hours from the tax preparer next tax season. I'll tell you how their pricing works and then we will get into how they've found their clients. So personal tax returns, they have a minimum fee of $600. They charge an hourly of $300 per hour to address complex tax issues. Treatment of crypto, treatment of investment income, rental Schedule C, etc. Business tax returns mainly pass throughs. They have a minimum fee of $1800 with an hourly of $300 per hour to address correction of bookkeeping issues and other complexities. Median prices for this year so far. For individual tax returns, Median price is $900. For partnerships, 2,900. For S Corps, 2,400. I'll just. This is just. I have to say this out loud. In fact, let me get the most up to date price for this. Hang on. Googling TurboTax Full Service Small business tax. Okay, here we go. Turbotax for small business. Drumroll please. Oh, they don't publish their pricing anymore. They got tired of me ragging on them. So TurboTax's full service small business offering was something like 1800 bucks for federal only. Basically, you go to TurboTax, you meet somebody online, you only work with them for one year, they file your tax return. Generally are not super experienced people. Not the same level of service that you get from like a firm. And that's federal only. No bookkeeping cleanup for 1800 bucks. So when I see a. A minimum fee of 1800 bucks for s corpse, if it's me, I say, hey, you want to pay me 1800 bucks? Great news. I got a referral partner over here. Why don't you go work with TurboTax on that return and then I'll see you back here next year and charge you for fixing everything the previous year. This is wild to me. Like the average fee for business tax prep in the US is still less than what Turbo Tax is charging. We got, we got to outgrow that gang. That's not a game we're trying to win. That's great news for us. As far as I'm concerned, they just drove the price way up. Okay, so median price for individual returns is 900. Partnerships, 2900. S. Corps, 2400. Those can all go up for sure. But listen, everybody's always on their own journey. There's always a fee that's higher. There's always a fee that's lower. This person is like a year and a half into their firm running journey. They're going to do over 200 grand in revenue this year with a couple part time employees. That's amazing. That is the American dream. Now for billing, they take 100% of that upfront or with an engagement letter signature. If complexities arise that require extra attention, the client's alerted and quoted before they proceed and, and they'll propose basically a progress billing at 300 an hour. But by and large things are priced up front and they take a hundred percent, 100% payment upfront before the work begins. Now how do they find all these clients? This is interesting. They have a website with strong SEO that drives web traffic. Google Ad calls are run October through January. We have a network of two bookkeeping firms that also send us referrals throughout the year for their clients that need a tax preparer. Their firm also owns an LLC partnership with two financial advisors where they send clients in exchange for a small percent of the profit. All those sources are combined to keep the pipeline steady with decent leads. I'd say most of our clients are B grade clients. So they're getting clients from their website. Good SEO. I guess they're getting some clients from Google Ads. They've got two bookkeeping firms that are sending them clients. Sounds like this firm. Although they're online, most of their clients are local. Ish. So they probably got a couple local bookkeepers they're working with and then two financial advisors are sending them clients. What do you think of that? Obviously I have thoughts. My, my main thought being this person has found a path to doing their own thing. And that's amazing. And like there is, there's nothing anyone should say to take away from that. But, but I will say no matter what, the one thing you always have to remember when you're building a firm is that the firm that you have today is only the firm that got you here to ready for, to ready you for the firm that you want to build next. And that doesn't mean that you burn what you have to the ground. It just means there's always something better. Like you can't be afraid of doing something different, doing something new, taking the client list in a slightly different direction. Like we are growing every single day every year and you're capable of cooler, newer, better stuff. And you have to afford yourself the ability to do that because when this stuff stagnates like it doesn't take all that many years. My opinion, working in public accounting, doing the same stuff, before you get B O R D board, you have to keep growing, you have to keep doing something different. And so this acquisition method, obviously they've built a good client list and these people are paying them pretty good money. There's a pretty good rates for For a one and a half year old firm, they're getting work from bookkeepers, from wealth managers. But by definition, the stuff that that's going to bring in, it's going to be a little bit of everything, right? And so they went out of their way to say, I would say that these are B grade clients, which is an acknowledgment that they know that they've either got a couple a clients on their list right now that they would love to find some more of or they at least have a picture of. I know there's something better. And as long as you know something better, know something better, as long as you know that there is something better, you gotta chase it, man, you gotta keep going after that. And so something like this, the pivot could be as simple as. Well, right now I have two bookkeeping firms and two financial advisors sending me work. What if I could go out and find two bookkeepers that serve this specific type of entrepreneur and two wealth managers that also serve this specific type of entrepreneur. It's as simple as that. You could have exactly the same growth pipeline just sending you a more specific type of person and that's gonna be a much easier, much more profitable business for you to. Now if you, if you stick with an approach like this where you're kind of like the town tax firm sort of thing, honestly like that, that usually inevitably becomes sort of a volume tax shop where you're doing a bit of, a bit of accounting work on the side. And I mean the honest truth here is the way that you make really, really good money with a volume tax shop is wealth management. But as soon as you roll out wealth management, all the wealth managers referring you work, they're not going to refer you work anymore. That might actually be why they started referring you work to begin with. Because the last guy they were referring work to started doing wealth management. The sad truth is those people, they've got a lot easier, a lot more profitable business to run than you do running a tax shop. And I hate saying that out loud because I am, I did tax from the ripe old age of 18. But when wealth managers look at a tax firm and they see what you do and what you go through in the hours that you work. And I mean, it depends like how, how, how, how do the wealth managers get paid? Like depends on assets under management and all that. But I've met a lot of people who are like goof, I would never do what you do. And so while there's always a way to run like a volume tax shop that can still make money. The way you really make money doing a lot of 1040s for example, is when you've got the wealth management work. So long term you either commit to like I'm just going to do the volume tax work thing and see how that goes. A lot of people end up the offshoring direction then because that's kind of the most cost effective way that you can do it. And it's very hard to hire onshore tax people. Or you say like we're actually going to roll all this in one or I'm going to pull in one of these advisors and have them build that part of the business for me and then that even that changes the type of client that you're targeting really. They say right now they're mainly targeting business tax work, but business tax work is usually not very good wealth management work. Like picking up a 401k is usually a whole bunch of work and not all that much in the way of assets. There's exceptions to for sure. But the average small business 401k, like it's a, it's a lot of admin and not a lot of assets as opposed to 1040s where you got a bunch of retirees. Maybe you're, you're the person inside of like a well to do little, little coastal community. That's when wealth management makes big time money. Now a word from them on what they enjoy and then we'll end with their tech. They said they love talking to clients about their client situations and educating slash advising them. Many of our clients came in fed up with no commute, communication from their last accountant and being able to meet that need and see clients so happy is satisfying. Awesome. That's amazing. I would say just don't lose that. For some reason like the natural way of things is our firms get pulled into more and more volume and the more volume we do, the less minutes there are in the day for relationship building and talking with your clients. So sometimes the thing that you prided yourself on in the beginning ends up becoming the victim of your own growth and that's. That can be a hard thing to fight against. They said they also love to build templates and automate where they can to trim the fat I. E. Time wasting space spent on firm admin as you should when it's largely you. I mean it's this person and a couple like seasonal helpers. They said they hate doing bookkeeping especially when there's lots of transactions. That's why they hired a part time Bookkeeper, you know, you don't have to do bookkeeping. In fact, I was surprised you had the partnerships with the bookkeepers because you do bookkeeping work. And a lot of times bookkeepers are going to be spooked that you might try to steal the bookkeeping work from them. If you totally despise it, you don't necessarily have to do the bookkeeping work. I think oftentimes, especially when people are launching firms, they say they'll do everything because they think that's what will win them clients. And in very specific situations, like maybe that's the case, the one thing I struggle with is, you know, tax on its own and bookkeeping on its own. They're kind of being commoditized, at least in the way that people talk about them online. And in ads like, like super bowl just happened. You're going to have super bowl ads for bookkeeping services, super bowl ads for tax services. And the way that they talk about it is very denigrating in our eyes. They make it sound overly simple and they will throw numbers up to make it look super, super cheap. When oftentimes those numbers aren't even real. That's like this starting number and then you get to the end and that number is eight times larger. But our clients and the market at large, they see all this and they see these numbers and it continues to reduce the perceived value of bookkeeping and the perceived value of tax work. And oftentimes what firms will do is they'll say, I know the solution is I'll do both. I'm going to be your one stop shop. And that's what's going to differentiate us, is if you come to us, we're going to do both your bookkeeping and your tax. The problem is both of those things individually have already been commoditized in the buyer's eye. And so arguably the worst thing that we can then do is then bundle those two things. Because then doesn't that give the expectation there should be discounting? And like, I mean, I saw this in a firm I was in when they first started doing bookkeeping work. They're like, oh yeah, no, if you bring the bookkeeping work to us, then we don't have to do all the bookkeeping cleanup at the end of the year. And so your tax return is cheaper. And so they were literally doing both bookkeeping and tax cheaper because it was being bundled. And so you have to commoditize things in. Our solution is to then bundle them, which just make them cheaper. Right. So it's a very hard way to win business and not the most profitable way to win business. Like the more profitable path here is to, to be the provider for a specific type of person. It's also to as much as possible get away from selling services and instead sell outcomes. And what we just opened this episode with the whole framing around, hey, I could save you one fte and you could repurpose that person into, into sales enablement. That's a profit opportunity. That's how we take what we do and we reframe it as hey, business owner, like how much more money could you make your business if you had another 15 hours per week? That's how we frame what we do. So can we go to work for a very specific type of person and find this offer that is, I will take this off of your plate and unlock this upside for you. So that when they think about what your fees are, they think of your fees relative to the upside, not the services. If we're selling services, then their mind goes to what is the rate that the market sets for services. They can go to the guy across the street and be like, who do you, who does your bookkeeping and what does it cost? And it's probably going to be less than, than you. And so they come back and be like, why am I paying so much for bookkeeping to you? As opposed to like, oh no, Tina, she like, I mean she freed up this, she freed up all this time for me. She walked us through xyz, showed us just through better tracking, how to say yes to more profitable projects. Like that is a upside oriented proposition, not a service oriented thing. If we're just selling services, then we're kind of selling commodities. Like that's. And that's what we want to get away from. Right? Anyways, if you hate doing bookkeeping, don't feel like you have to do bookkeeping. Don't just do bookkeeping because you think your clients are going to make you do both tax and booking bookkeeping. The more interesting thing to do is find something to sell that other providers don't sell because it's so specific. What's something that other providers, only taxidermists need that other accounting firms won't do for them. Don't sell the thing that anybody will do where they go into that accounting firm's office and they're like bookkeeping for taxidermists. Yeah, we don't have any of those, but I'm sure we can figure it out. Sell the thing that none of them do, then you're the only one offering that. And then after that, if you want, you can sell them all the other stuff. But winning business on the breadth of your services, having to do a whole bunch of different things, that's a really hard business to manage and a hard work to do profitably. 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 sponsor. She just said cloud account staffing. Four people starting at the same. Can you imagine? I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy. But you know what? Cloud account 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, 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 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. 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. They 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 Verdo can also do your whisp, the little security thing you got to do if you do tax work in the us they can also be your entire IT department. In fact, the cost of hosting your apps and them being your IT department is less than Thompson, Reuters Virtual Office know a lot of people, they're 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 Verto, check out the link down in the show notes. Okay, last their tech, they've struggled building internal processes for their bookkeeper, for example, workflow automation within Canopy and systematizing our dysfunctional clients that can't get us our own baking banking sub user logins sidebar because if you do any bookkeeping, you have versions of this problem where you've got clients that are using some awful bank and you have to do the whole like two FA code hokey pokey every month. There are really good, clear solutions to this. We have to stop apologizing for how we inconvenience our clients with this and instead tell them the right way to do it. The right way to do it is getting to a more modern bank. Like you look at Mercury, you look at ramp. Like there are really, really good banking platforms that will give you granular user management. Because in this day and age, sharing passwords with clients, having them forward you two factor authentication codes, like, I mean that's almost irresponsible at this point. So rather than being like, so sorry to inconvenience you with this or oh sorry, the code just expired, we're going to send you another one if you're, if you're ready for that. Rather than doing that whole hokey pokey, be like, hey, like we're willing to help you with this for a bit, but know that like the right way to do this is over here and we can help you make that switch. And I don't want to make it sound like that switch is super easy or trivial, but that is the right way to do it, not this sort of casually old system. That's one of the reasons why Ramp has become so popular with accounting firms. Like on, on my workshop tour, I was shocked. Ramp was one of the sponsors and we kind of did this ad read where I like. I asked people to raise their hands, who here is a ramp user? Probably 30 to 40% of every room were Ramp users, which that amount of usage of a product in any accounting room is very notable since there's so many different tools. But I think that's one of the reasons why Ramp has become so popular with firms as it solves a lot of those access problems. I don't know why I say I think I do. I use it inside of my, in my own business. I know it solves some of those issues, but if you got those clients that are headache clients, there are solutions for that. In fact, both the things I mentioned, Mercury Ramp, we've done videos on the YouTube channel. You can check them out, you can share those videos with a client. There's better ways to manage all the access issues. Back to their submissions here, they said it's also difficult to pinpoint when I should aim to hire another full time associate slash preparer and knowing when I'll be at capacity before it's too late and I'm in busy season. Yeah, it's. I mean it's always better to hire earlier than later because to your point, when you're at capacity, you don't have time to hire, you don't have time to train. And a really hard and demoralizing aspect of managing a team is if you're hiring onshore people in 2026, you have to just plan on a really high percentage of them flaming out. And I wish there was any amount of due diligence and planning and trial days and all of this that could fully capture this. But if you're hiring three onshore people, it's a miracle if all three of them are working for you after 90 days. Like that's just the reality. But what we do is we're like, oh, we need three people, so we're going to hire three. And then if you're lucky enough to actually get to three that you like and then one of them drops off after a week or after a couple of months, then you're just devastated because you're like, well crap, we need three people. Like we're back to square one. We got to start that whole process over again. That is the reality of hiring. We sort of have to bias our plans accordingly. Be it over hiring or even just mentally not getting our hopes up too much and recognizing that, like, there's a real good chance this stuff's going to flame out. Like, the number of people I've been blown away with in the interview process who I went on to fire on the first day or were showing up buzzed in the first week, like, unfortunately, that's just that. And there's no way to, like, we should try to mitigate all that stuff and avoid those issues however we can. But there is no way to avoid 100 of those things. We just have to recognize that stuff's going to happen. And the thing we can't do is keep those people when we're like, ooh, they're not what we thought we were and there's some problems here trying to fix them. Then, like, that's not the solution. So, yes, don't wait until you're at capacity, but also recognize it's not always going to work out. In fact, just as often as it doesn't work out, it will work out. Did that make sense? You know what I mean? So, yes, don't wait too long to hire. One thought on the bookkeeping stuff, don't use canopy to like, canopy is not going to automate your bookkeeping work. Canopy is a practice management system that is for tax first firms. I would tell you that. I don't know if they would tell you that canopy does a lot of amazing things and it can manage the work. But there are much better platforms for automating the bookkeeping work. In this case. I got no problem with canopy. In fact, you're using a ton of canopy stuff. We didn't get into it, but they're doing engagement letters and proposals and all that stuff in canopy, which is super cool having that all in one place. But for automating and standardizing bookkeeping work, go use double. Like, double is the best of the best. Works just fine alongside canopy. And it like comes out of the box with processes and systems that will get your bookkeeper doing that work in a more standardized way than they ever have before. So I would say canopy, great tool, but the wrong tool for the job that you're describing. Canopy's like, starts at like $10 per client per month. Like, that's a total no brainer buy in your situation. And it will solve a lot of the bookkeeping standardized standardization headaches that you're talking about, brother. Thank you for submitting this. Good for you. You're absolutely crushing it. Can't wait to see what you're doing in five years, 10 years time. Also, thanks for listening to the pod and being part of this whole conversation. I hope I've given you something of value. And the folks listening in, like, drop a comment like, what? What would you share with this person? We got a lot of people listening who have been at a firm for years or run a firm for decades. You hear a young whippersnapper like that. Are there any traps when you were at a similar stage that you walked right into that you could save somebody else from going into? Put that stuff down in the comments. I am persistently impressed by the quality of the people that engage with this podcast and share your stories and, you know, make me sharper by sharing your experiences and all of that. Like, I feel truly fortunate to get to do what I do. Come here. Give me, give me a hug. Give me a hug, everybody. Okay, enough of that. That was weird. If you wanted a chance to have your firm anonymously roasted, check out the link down in the show notes. There's a little intake form, but let's get into the mailbag. Mailbag. Mailbag. This segment is called. Mailbag. I'm gonna be honest, little more disappointed that I haven't seen more comments about these transitions, Absolute banger transitions that we've been doing the last couple of weeks. It's one of those situations where you're like, man, I made this thing that I'm really proud of and I worked really hard on this and I just need some acknowledgment and validation from the world. Right? Doesn't always come. Okay, mailbag. These are questions that have been submitted from podcast comments, via email, via dm, via text. You want to text me? My number is 1-516-980-4968. Text me. Send me a voicemail. I've actually gotten pretty much caught up on text messages now, going Back to like 2 or 3 month old messages where I got behind and didn't get caught up. But if you want to be best friends, send me a text. First up, what are some things you can hire an AI agency to do, like make your own practice management solution? Great question. If you've never worked with an AI agency before, there's a growing number of AI agencies just for accounting firms. I don't want to plug any specific ones because I worry if I do, it'll make them suck because, you know, services like that they're really, really good when they're new and you're working with the founder, but as they grow and all that, they just, they're not as good anymore anyways. Go out and do some Google and poke around on LinkedIn. You'll find an agency that works with accounting firms. But the best things that you can have them do, I would say, are not things like making your own practice management solutions. Don't go to an AI agency to build you custom platform software like a pm, which is a big lift piece of software. Maybe there's a world where it's a more like small, fiddly sort of tool. Like I've heard all sorts of stories of niche clients with very specific needs. They have this one system and there's this high volume of work that your team has to do to get it into this other system. There's for sure a situation where a little micro app that just runs locally could make that work easier for you and an AI agency could potentially build that for you. But where AI agencies are really cool, and these are AI agencies that work just with accounting firms, is when they've seen other accounting firms that use the same tech stack that you do and they have recommendations for how you can get those tools to better talk to each other, even off the shelf automations that they have already built for other firms that you can pay for and leverage. So tax shops, not that many tax softwares out there. A lot of these agencies have a lot of reusable things that they built for different pieces of tax software to automate some aspects of the software and things like updating clients and printing out tax returns and splitting them up and putting them wherever you want them in your, in your file system, stuff like that. And so rather than thinking about an AI agency as a solution to like build you totally custom software, I would say think of them as being able to build helpful plumbing for the tools you already use. Like extend those tools a little bit, get them to do a little bit more, maybe get them to talk a little better with the other tools. But also maybe equally valuable is to ask them like, here are the tools that I use, how can you help us? What have you done with other folks? Like that's a big part of the value they can bring to you. Super recommend. If you're the type of person that like wants to go deep on agentic stuff and like, you know, AI tax return review, like there's a lot of people working on that right now. AI financial statement review. There's totally Versions of this that you can build with AI right now by engaging, engaging an agency to come and do this with you. My take, as someone who started making content that was like no code automation for accountants, that's where I got started. And only over time have I zoomed out to now be, you know, not only tech for accounting firms, but strategy for accounting firms. Has been a very gradual four year journey for me where just like anybody else, I had to start in a very, very specific place. And then over time I got more general. If you are wired like me, where you love building that stuff yourself and you want to play with it, depending on the type of firm that you're running, recognize that if you're the big boss running the shop, that's most often not going to be the best way for you to spend your time, unfortunately. And everything you build is an obligation because it's up to you to fix it. When something goes sideways, you're the only one that knows how it works and before you know it, you're playing software night janitor. Having to fix all these things that you made just to keep the whole operation running. That's where it makes sense to pull in an AI agency to help. All that being said though, the more you know and the more you understand what's possible, the more you're going to get out of an AI expert because you're going to see the opportunities and now you can delegate the building of that opportunity to somebody else. And because you kind of have your head around things like you're just going to be a better guide sort of of that process and, and of those implementations than somebody who doesn't have any expertise. So you can still use that expertise, just don't put it all on yourself. Next up, what percentage of clients do you like to see upgrading to your top tier service? 10%. Do you have a threshold? This is a great question. So if you're going to roll out three tier proposals, what percentage should go up to silver? What percentage should go up to gold? The way I do my three tier proposals, if you're starting out doing it for the first time, it's pretty much everybody starts at bronze. Bronze is kind of sally like you know, 5, 10% pricing bump. And then you build out those silver packages and the bronze and the gold packages to not be more work but to be a more premium service delivery. So brown silver, Gold is coach business class, first class. What percentage of folks should opt into silver and gold? This is a really tough one. And the percentage that I would actually like to see might be lower than you'd think. Because if we purely think about this from a math standpoint, a profit optimization standpoint, those like percentages ought to be pretty small. So like I'm thinking probably not more than 30% going up to silver and not more than 10% going up to gold. Because the way I recommend pricing these three tier proposals is basically the silver project is twice as profitable as the bronze project. So take the margin of your firm. Are you a 40% margin firm? Are you a 20% margin firm? The price of silver should be 20% more or 40% more. So that if somebody says yes to silver, that project's now twice as profitable as it would have been had they said yes to bronze. But then the step to gold is like a four to five times more profitable project. So I don't need, in fact, I shouldn't have all that many people saying yes to silver and gold. And if I do, then I've probably underpriced the work. So the price optimized version of this probably has less than 30% of people going up to silver, less than 10% of people going up to gold. Now, how do you actually optimize this without doing this yolo thing across 100% of your client base? If time allows, as I say this in February, right? If time allows, you do this in batches. So I don't push it out to all of my clients at once. I do it to, you know, the first 20% of clients. And so this whole three tier methodology we're talking about, you do this both with proposals to new clients, but you also do it every year in an annual renewal to your existing clients. So if I'm doing this for the first time, I would first push three tier proposals out to 20% of my client base. And if 50% come back and say yes to silver, price needs to go up. So next batch of 20, price goes up, but it's higher. What Price goes up, but it's higher. Talk much? I send out the next 20% and the price is higher than the previous 20% because too many people said yes before. And we, we kind of keep adjusting it with each batch of proposals that we send out to kind of get it to a point where we think the pricing is optimized. And sometimes I say that and it like, scandalizes folks. They're like, oh, you mean it just depends what bucket the client's in. That's what dictates the price they pay. Gang. The thing about pricing is everything's made up. And the points don't matter. Like it really is. Like pricing is not tied to anything. It's not tied to hours or time. If it were, then if you just build hourly, you wouldn't have anybody complain about about what you're charging them. But people will always complain, whether you're doing it associated with time or just picking a number. Like people complaining, it's because the value they assign to it is less than the price you're charging them. And so if we just math this out, the way that you price your three tier proposals is going to be what price maximizes profit. And when your gold tier option is four to five times as profitable, obviously every person that says yes to one of those, if you wanted, you could cut four bronze projects. You're going home at like 9:45 in the morning. Doesn't sound so bad. But you don't need all that many people to say yes to the gold tier. And I was actually actually in New York at our workshop in Manhattan and a guy was like, hey, I got a question. So I'm doing a three tier proposal thing and everybody's saying yes to gold. What should I do? And I would say the first answer is like, well, charge way more than you do right now. That's great news. But you need to charge way more than you're charging right now. So I don't have like a perfect answer for what percentage I would like to see, but probably not more than 30% going up to silver and probably not 10% going up to gold. If any more than that are going up to those, then you're probably going to end up with a whole bunch of people at those premium tiers, potentially more people than you need. And if those prices had been another 20% higher, like fewer people would have said yes to them, but those projects would be much more profitable. But the way you manage that in practice is not pushing all those proposals out at once, but doing them kind of in groups. Hey, real quick, if you use Microsoft Outlook or Gmail in your accounting firm, pay real close attention to what I'm going to tell you next. This podcast sponsor missive. It is email like you have always wanted. It is a team first approach to managing email. Would you believe me if I told you Microsoft Outlook, which came out, I think we worked it out. It was pre middle school for me. Microsoft Outlook, it is not the best like email platform for accounting firms. That may come as a shock to you. And when we're spending a huge percentage of our time on email accountants on average in My polling spend one to two hours a day just managing email. It means the tool you use for email is incredibly important. Missive over 500 accounting firms have moved their email to Missive. We did a demo of missive on my YouTube channel a few months back. People freaking flipped. In fact I made a social post, a sponsored social post. A couple days later. Over 50 people opted to hop in on a demo like a little show and tell that we were doing the next week from an accounting firm that's been running all their email on Misa for the last few years. Some practice management systems will manage your email inbox, but most of them all they do is connect to it, which is great. So I can see the emails associated with my client records. But it is not a like productive place to be composing and managing email by any stretch of the imagination. Missive it is the inbox tool for teams built from the ground up to make you more productive with this stuff and give you a path to like delegating email work for the first time too. I'm a big fan of the tool. To learn more about Missive, check out that Demo on my YouTube channel. Then head on down to the show Notes to learn more. 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, 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 I 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. 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. Next up, I'm trying to get into content creation myself. Could you recommend any AI video generation tools for my videos? I can, but I don't know that I should. So we use AI video B roll in my videos because I think it's funny, not because we're trying to like fake me doing anything. I just think it's more interesting than stock photography B roll. And it is the thing that people complain about most in the comments and they're like, this is super cringe. Like, I just can't handle it with all the AI video. And it's like, I mean, that's kind of the joke is it is cringe. Like, isn't that kind of my brand is being cringe? And so it's a little divisive. And that's fine. But if you're just starting out with content creation, the most important thing is that people can build a connection with you. And the reason why I don't really object to us using AI video B roll in our videos is oftentimes that video is. It's. It's either funny or it's illustrative. And so it adds to the video, but it doesn't take away from me being on screen. The reality is we vault. I mean, everybody on YouTube has turned into like seven year olds. And our attention span is such that like the, the what they see needs to be changing every three to four seconds. Like, and I can show you that in the data. If I took out all the AI B roll and it was just me talking, retention would be much worse. Like, that's just the reality of human attention right now. But I'm not using that to take away from me and the connection that I make with the viewer. And that's the most important skill that you can learn if you're getting started doing video is not being robotic and being able to, like, connect with folks. Like, right now, like, I'm sitting in a room by myself wondering if you can hear my kids screaming on the other side of the door, talking to. Into a lens, right? That's weird. That's not a human thing. But when you get comfortable with that and when you do that, a whole bunch of like, you learn to be able to connect with people still. And you can. You can have a moment, right? You can be like, is he. Is he talking to me right now? Did we. Did he just hug me through a podcast? Is that even okay? Like, that's the skill that you need to build. And I, I mean, go back and watch my very first videos on YouTube, which were like 100 videos in when I even started publishing those, and I'm like, hey, welcome back. My name, Jason Stats. Welcome to launch for Accountants. Like, I was the same person. And that wasn't that long ago, three or four years ago. But, like, your personality and your essence and your Riz, your ability to channel that through a camera, through a video, that's a learning skill and that's the most important thing that you can learn. And so any amount of effort that you're putting into AI video, like, I honestly wouldn't really recommend it. But to answer the question, Google, Veo and Sora, they're the best ones right now. But I wouldn't invest much time in the AI video stuff. Just like, be you, be authentic. Because the video that's only you is way better than the video that's only AI video. Right? That's why I'm just not that interested in, like, the AI replicas of people. If those tools were going to be huge, they would have been huge already. Like, we've been able to make clones, visual clones of ourselves now for a couple of years. Where do you see that stuff being used and where do you see it? And you're like, cool, I want more of that. Like, nobody is. Nobody's saying that all the AI stuff is doing is increasing the appetite for humanity and connection. Just go to LinkedIn. If you're in somebody's comments and you see a comment that was written by a human. You're like, wow, thank you so much human for popping by and leaving a comment between all these bots. It's just you really went the extra mile with that one. Okay. Hey, Jason, should I go with Mac or Windows if I'm planning to build an accounting firm? Brother, whatever you're more comfortable with, you can do either. I know folks that have built firms on both, actually know accounting firms that let their staff choose PC or Mac. What a nightmare. But whatever you're more comfortable with doesn't really matter. If you're in the US and you're doing tax work and you use a Mac, you will have some apps that you have to host. Like you'll end up having to host your tax software. But let's you know a secret, the people on the PC, they're also hosting those apps too because most of them don't want to have a local server anymore. So you can really do it on PC or Mac. So up to you. Whatever you're most comfortable with. Thanks for the text. Next up, never share your intuit code 38422. Nope, that's not a question. Okay. I work for a larger firm than some than some of your content is for. And I try to take the concepts and tools to apply them where I can. Do you know of any resources or influencers similar to yourself with a larger firm focus? Our real pain point is around practice management software and CRM at 15 to 20 million level. There's a lot of 15 to 20 million level people that are plugged in here. My community realize has quite a few 15 million people firm folks in it. There's maybe 20, 25 folks in there and we're actually putting people into small groups right now. So 15 to $20 million firms, there's actually quite a few of those people around. In fact, if you are one drop a comment. I will say there. I don't. I mean, you want to talk about accounting influencers, they just don't exist really. And I think part of the blocker is people don't want to stop running an accounting firm and just do this grift that I do because their identity is kind of, it's in running an accounting firm. And you're like, how can I tell people how to run an accounting firm if I don't do it myself? And I mean, we need more people doing what I do for auditors, for bookkeepers, for folks not in the United States. Because I think you're, you're doing some kind of accounting too. And no for big firms like there just aren't influencers. But I will say a lot of that same info sharing is happening behind closed doors. Like you look at like you know, BDO and like Boomer Consulting. Like a lot of the really valuable stuff there is sort of the roundtable type of setups where you're bringing tech leaders from different firms together and they're sharing ideas and all that. So that stuff is happening just not happening on YouTube. So I would look for kind of some of those corners where you can connect more directly with people. I mean my community, we do that in my community as well. But no, there are no major accounting celebrities for midsize firms that I'm aware of. Jason, had a tech stack question for you. Started using Canopy for our firm and I really like it. But I've noticed that while I'd like to keep everything centralized in one platform regarding for stuff like billing, engagement letters and all that, Ignition tends to have better proposal Options I. E. 3 tiers. Curious your thoughts if it's really worth giving up Canopy's built in billing module and using Ignitions instead totally depends on how far you're pushing the envelope on your proposals. Obviously I come here and I shout at you every single day about how you need to put more effort into your proposals because it's the one screen where your client says yes to a price and the price is kind of all that matters for your business. And so if we're going to put effort into anything, let's put it into proposals. Canopy, to be fair, like every practice management system, I even when most practice management systems don't. So I had a little bit of a stroke there. Most practice management systems don't have a proposal solution at all. But the ones that do, their proposal solution is very basic. That being said, Canopy, the integration of the proposals with all the rest of the workflow and all that, it's pretty darn slick. It's pretty cool. But yes, you definitely lose some functionality compared to Ignition and Anchor, who are the the strongest standalone proposal tools. And I don't care what Canopy tells you or anybody else, it will always be that way. Like a company that's only working on proposals, it will always be better and leading the way on proposals. So it's more a question of for you, what is enough. So how far are you pushing the envelope on this stuff? I think you really just need to test what Canopy has and for the way that you use it. Will Canopy be enough? If it's not, go in and pull the other tool like you can always go back to Canopy if you have to. But if you are like me, where proposal optimization is a huge part of your business, as I think it needs to be for more people, I think I would pretty much always go to a standalone proposal solution because any optimization in that process that will get a client to say yes to a slightly larger number, in my opinion, is worth it. And three tier proposals, I mean, are a huge profit boost to any accounting firm. I won't go any deeper on that here because I've, I mean, go back and listen to the last, oh, 18 months of the podcast and you will hear more than enough of me talking about how to optimize your three tier proposals. Thanks for the question. Hey Jason, did you change hair products or did you start getting your hair cut at your labradoodles groomer? Thanks for all you do. I just could go to the next one. Hey Jason, I have a question about raising fees on clients year over year. If they're already in a silver or gold tier package, how can I justifiably increase prices each year at renewal season? I don't want the client to get fatigued by increases and think they're paying too much for the same services they previously received. Is 5 to 10% enough year over year if they've gotten increases in the past? Let me split that out into two questions. So clients have already been on the silver or gold tier package package. Recognize that you can always have a gold tier package that is even golder. All gold is, is more exclusive, more access to you, and more expensive. And so if somebody says yes to an even golder package, it just means you're going to have to help fewer clients and so you can give them even more. And there's no end to this. Like, there are accounting firms who will only work with businesses they take equity in. Like, that's one extreme is like the only way I'll support you is if I actually own part of your business. That's pretty darn gold, right? I was talking with a guy that does CFO work and we were like, we're already very hands on. It feels like what we already do is gold. So how do we go up at all? And I'm like, tell me what you do. And we just started riffing on ideas and it was like what we got to was like, what would it look like to do like an off site a couple times a year and you bring like six to eight clients out in person? He's like, yeah, no, they would love that. That would actually be pretty cool. So you can always redefine what gold is to platinum to zirconium. You can always do a gold or gold, if that's a fun path for you. And I would say for a lot of us, it is. Because most of us actually don't want to do the volume thing. We just want to go deeper with more people. Because that's how we got into all this, is we just love helping people and going hands on with them. Like, imagine serving a tenth as many clients and they have your cell phone number. Like, they have more access to you. You hang out with them. Like, that could be cool. The reason most of us don't want our clients to have more access to us right now is there's too many of them. Is your phone would be on fire. But what if it was just the clients that you loved and you vibed with? That would be a pretty cool business. Right? That is the golder path. And so you can always go golder and charge more when you go more gold. Now, what is the appropriate amount to increase prices when they're getting the same amount, amount of work? If you get to the point where you don't feel right charging them more, then let them go. Because if the market is saying yes to bigger and bigger prices, you have to follow the market. Like, that's what I would do. If my new client price keeps going up and up and up and up and people are still saying yes to it, it just means I haven't found my market value yet. Now, in some ways, it's unfair if you don't give legacy clients the opportunity to pay you what you're really worth. Now, like, if you just cut them and you assume they won't pay it, in some ways that's unfair too. But you look at like, Logan Graff, who every year posts his firm financial statements on his YouTube channel. He's basically increased fees, like almost 100% several years in a row and half people left. Yes. But he's built a firm that is a infinitely better lifestyle. That guy's got a whole pack of little kids. Who are you serving at the end of the day, like yourself and your time and your availability and the people you love or the people who will only ever talk to you if it's because you'll do their tax return or do their bookkeeping? Like, we got to keep perspective on this stuff sometimes. But it is a good question. Like, we, we all struggle with like, the. Is this fair to my client? I don't want it to feel like a rug pull. This is a great reason why, like, you should never let clients in the door at your minimum, because two years from now, your minimum is going to look totally different. Like, let clients in at a price you're really happy with right now. That's it. Don't make the legacy underpriced client problem worse. And you know, some of the. Some of the devils in the details here of the execution of how you go about doing it. If you can build a network of other firms for whom those are great clients and you can let those clients along kind of easily to another great home, in my mind, that's a much better way to do it than just being like, peace, you'll figure it out. And you're kind of paying it forward to the next firm down the road too, gang. Have I told you how much I appreciate you? Thanks for being here today. Been really enjoying this new format. Got any questions? Shoot me a text. Shoot me an email. My email is Jason at jasononfirms. Com. Appreciate you being here today and I'll catch you in the next one.