581 Computer Monitors - An Accountant’s Guide

It has come to my attention that too many accountants are still using crappy monitors. All right, this might be a hot take, but I would argue in this day and age, the most important tech that you buy is not your computer. It is actually your monitor. This is because computers continue to get more powerful, while, like, the computing demands of what we do really doesn't get that much harder. I would say, besides your awful Google Chrome hygiene, we got, like, 65 tabs open and eight videos autoplaying. I'm not talking about that guy. I'm not here to help that guy. Computers these days, they got plenty of horsepower. But how you interface with your computer when you are spending 12 hours a day at the battle station, buddy, what those peepers are locked into, it matters. It really does. We're talking about monitors today, but also we're coaching a $15 million accounting firm. Going to offer some practical advice for kind of what they're stuck on and what they can do next. But also, what are the most important pages to have on your accounting firm's website? The best way to manage complex client groups in your practice management system, how to build a bonus structure for your team, and how to start your own accounting firm while you're working for another firm. If you're afraid that the boss is going to see what you're doing, is that okay? Is there a way to do it still? It's messy, but we're going to talk about it. Let's do it. Okay, Computer monitors. Here's the thing. I want to make this as clear as possible. So I've identified 10 elements, 10 considerations when it comes to buying a monitor that we need to be factoring in? Some of these things may not be things you've ever heard about. For example, pop quiz. Do you know what type of panel the monitor you're looking at right now is? And if your response is, what is even that, Jason, then you've come to the right place. Because when you're gonna spend more waking hours looking at this thing than anything else in your life, it's kind of like the argument that people make for buying a better mattress. Well, you're going to. You'll spend 70 years of your life on a bed. Make sure it's the right one. Well, you'll spend even more looking at your monitor. Okay. When's the last time you gave that a good thought? Am I using the right one? Okay, 10 factors when buying a monitor, and I'm going to present them to you in order of importance. Factor number one is the resolution of the monitor. This is much more important than the size of the monitor is the resolution of the monitor. The resolution is basically just how many pixels are on the displ. And so the most common sizes you will see are 1080, 1440, 4K and 8K. And what these numbers are referring to, kind of, not kind of, sort of. It used to be like the number of vertical pixels on a display. But then people fight about like, oh, Jack, is 4K really 4K? What about 2, 5K? What about 2K? Most commonly, the displays you're considering are either going to be 1080p, 1440p, 4k or 8k, which is kind of a different vernacular, but we're just going to cruise past that. K, super, super nerd. Now you do not want a 1080 display in the year 2026. There's no world where you should be buying a 1080 display. And unfortunately they still exist. I was raised in an accounting firm where the computer hardware we bought was that thing that the owner walked by in Costco and was like, honey, holy. Well, that's a great deal. Let's pick up 12 of these loss leader 25 inch weird off brand monitors that they've got at Costco right now. And then those would come back to the office and you might get one. But your second monitor is something totally different. That cheap stuff. Sometimes it will still come with a 1080p display. And if you don't know what your display's resolution is, just go into your monitor settings. Can you. I spend, I'm, I'm a couple years removed from being a Windows user. Can you still right click the desktop? Maybe it depends on your graphics card. Go to Settings, type monitor display, something like that. On macOS, you just go to Settings, you go to Display and you can change the resolution of your monitor to different resolutions, right? If it's 1920 by 1080, that means you got a 1080 display, which is great news because things can only get better from here. Most commonly what most people have is 2560 by 1440, which frankly is adequate. It's actually probably totally fine. And what most people should be using, that's a reasonably, reasonably high resolution display. And on most of the sizes that we're going to talk about, it's, it's enough pixels for you to put two like portrait documents side by side on your monitor. Now the people that want to flex on you and accountants take so much pride in their monitor setup. As we've covered on this podcast at length, we used to have you Know eight monitor guy. I mean, it started at three. That was impressive. And it went to four. And like at this point, you've got like a totally custom graphics card to do this. But we didn't stop there. You went like full day traders. Six monitors, eight monitors. Every, every event I go to, I have accountants raise their hand. And you know, you start with like three monitors. Everybody raise their hand. And then four monitors. Leave your hand up. Five, leave your hand up. And there's just, there's always a couple guys that are just ooh, ooh, ooh. Like their hand is so high because they want everybody to know how many monitors they have. I honestly, I feel like. And I'm. I don't know, I feel pretty with the Times. The editors that will edit my videos, they're all zoomers. And so I feel like I'm keeping up. I think we're post 10 monitors. Like, I think we are post that being impressive. Now that most of these people, the next evolution they go into is humongo monitor guy. Let's say 42 inches or more. You can get up to 50 over 50. Some people are using TVs very often. These are really crappy panels. So it's actually like harder to read text and all that stuff. But come on, like what are we, we trying to get a suntan we don't need. That's too much. Two nice monitors. That is what most of us need. Because if we go back to the days when Most people had two monitors and it wasn't enough, those were two 1080p displays. You couldn't display enough on a monitor for two to be enough. But these days, most displays are much higher resolution. By and large, they've gotten bigger. Like when I was coming up, like we were working on 19 inch displays. Like now. I mean you can almost get a MacBook with a 19 inch display. Everybody's using, you know, 24 inches minimum, but clear up to 32 is very common. So the first thing I want you paying attention to is the resolution. Just don't buy 1080p. Anything above that is fine. My take here is 4k, and 8k, by and large is going to be a waste. If you got a 4k or an 8k display, that's so many pixels that you become reliant upon. I'm just gonna assume most people here are using Windows because this is not a Mac issue. Well, it's kind of a Mac issue. If you're using a 4K or an 8K display, you become reliant Upon Windows ability to scale the text size of the apps that you use, and on modern apps on stuff in the Internet browser, that all works totally fine. But it doesn't work it if you're using legacy tax software, hosted applications, stuff like that. This was four or five years ago. I bought, I bought like a, I think it was a 4K display. But then we had hosted Thomson Reuters products that we had to use and that stuff, there's no text scaling in that stuff. So I had a 4K display. I literally couldn't use 4K resolution because when I did, those hosted applications were too small. I couldn't even read the text. And that is just such a stupid and frustrating thing to have to say aloud because. But if you are forced to use tools like that, which most bookkeepers won't be, most accountants not in the US have already stopped listening. But if you are in the US doing tax work, I would say on a Windows machine, in all likelihood you won't even be able to run that monitor at 4k, let alone 8k. Which is why I think the best bang for your buck for most people is 1440p displays. Now we're going to get to size and aspect ratio. Even if you like the super mega ultra widespread, still the resolution of those displays pay attention to the vertical number of pixels. And so most of those ultra wides are still 1440-1440 P displays. So they may be 100 inches wide, but the number of vertical pixels is still 1440p. That is my take on what the right resolution, the best balance resolution is. If you disagree, leave a comment. So first, most important consideration, resolution. Second size. My take in 2026 is under 27 inches is a no go zone. But my other take here, which is going to make a lot of people mad, is over 32 is also a no go zone. Okay? Over 32 is the jacked up truck of the office setup. Listen, I'm. We're some hard truths are coming out here today and you're entitled to your opinion, but mine's right. I think that monitor needs to be between 27 and 32 inches. You're a grown man. Cool it. Okay, consideration number three, and you may not be thinking about this one panel type that is like the type of the display itself. Because there's different technologies for building monitors. The three main ones are called ips, VA and oled. Oled, almost always the right answer for you will be an IPS display. A lot of people, OLED people got upset about that with an IPS display the text will be easiest to read. But there are still a lot of cheap displays on the market, especially if you're doing anything secondhand. There's a lot of cheap displays on the market that are VA displays. Now VA displays, their only real upside is they can be higher contrast, but they are thankfully going out of style. There's fewer of them out there. Fewer new displays are VA displays. Like obvious characteristic of them is they have really poor viewing angles. So like if you're kind of from the side, they're very hard to see. If you think back to like early displays, just how you had to be kind of straight on to see what was going on on the display, can still get VA panels that have very bad viewing angles. For most people the right answer will be ips. Now the answer for oled, which is kind of the newest technology here, OLED kind of reinvented a TV technology. LG did like five or six years ago O OLED is, I mean as of five or six years ago, OLED I think was the coolest TV tech. And the upsides are you get like perfect blacks, like really dark blacks. Other panels, the blacks aren't really black, they're kind of gray. You also get really, really good colors from OLEDs. One risk with OLEDs is they are the type where you can have screen burn in that is like the pixels don't change on part of that screen for a long time and then when you turn the monitor off, you try to use it down the road. Like those pixels are literally burned in. You can still see the shape and the color of it. Now this is one of the biggest counter arguments against OLEDs. This problem has gotten way better and actually via software they can prevent a lot of it. Like when you turn your monitor off, it'll do this sort of auto cleaning thing. And there's actually good enough warranties now that come with OLED monitors to where you're pretty protected from this stuff. Like, like Alienware. A couple years ago, Alienware, their main OLED monitor, it started coming with a three year warranty. And so like the whole OLED burn in thing, not really that big of a deal anymore. Where it can be an issue is like if somebody's got like you know, CNN on all day long and that bright red CNN logo is in the same static place for 24 hours, that's where potentially you can have burn in issues. Also on like a computer desktop display, if your monitor never turns off and you've got like the Windows bar At the bottom there is a, there is a small risk of burn in. But if you, if you end up going the OLED route for some reason because you like the colorfulness or something like that, just watch out for warranties that you can get with it. Some of those panels come with warranties. I would only buy one that does come with a warranty because warranty generally covers burn in protection. Now the bigger issue with OLED monitors is text is not going to be as readable. It's just not going to be as crisp when you are looking at text. And that's the biggest thing in what we do. So ips, that is the type of display that is going to make the most sense for most people. So so far you're looking for a 1440 display, especially if you're a tax pro. If you're not a tax pro, I can maybe see an argument for 4k. Honestly, 8k is waste size. Keep it between 27 and 32k. Who are you trying to impress? This is, I mean this is a professional decision. And then third, you almost certainly want an IPS type panel. Now number four has nothing to do with the monitor at all. It is monitor arms. And you know just how important monitor arms to me are to me. Where to begin? The only place I buy monitor arms from are Ergotron. And they're expensive and I don't care because they are the least bouncy monitor arms I've ever found. The Amazon special just ain't gonna cut it. As I'm tippy tapping on the keyboard. I can't have that thing bouncing all, all over the place. So monitor arms, very important. Clears up your desk space. Cause you don't have a monitor stand. Then under your monitor you've got so much room for activities. But also monitor arms solve the problem of like, I can lift my monitor as high as I want, I can put it as low as I want. I can turn it to portrait layout. Like turn it up on its side so you don't have to worry about like, does the monitor stand that comes with my monitor, does it even have a height adjustment? Like how can it be adjusted? Monitor arm solves for all of those problems and you get a bunch of space back on your desk. One thing to look out for when you're buying a monitor. If you're planning to use a monitor arm as you should, make sure the monitor has a Vesa mount. Vesa. That Visa mount is like the standard mount that monitor arms will use to attach to your monitor. There are some like weird monitors that have, like over the top sort of mounts. This is a bigger issue with gaming monitors when they try to get real fancy with the stand. Just make sure your monitor has a VESA mount on the back so you can mount it to an arm on to number five ports, the plugs, the ports in your monitor. The only real big consideration here because there's this is pretty much consolidated now. It's all HDMI and what is it? Mini, mini DisplayPort. But the one consideration here is potentially, potentially, if you're a laptop user buying a monitor with Thunderbolt now, the Thunderbolt version, like, you take the monitors in the Dell lineup, most of the monitors have a Thunderbolt version and it costs more money. The potential upside of Thunderbolt is the whole idea that you could almost use the monitor itself as a dock. So you plug your laptop into the monitor via Thunderbolt with just a single cable. But then like your mouse, your keyboard, anything else, peripherals could potentially be plugged into the monitor itself. Generally, Thunderbolt monitors will then have USB ports on them, so you can plug directly into the monitor or plug a USB hub into it or something like that. You can also sometimes daisy chain monitors. Thunderbolt monitors, that is so like, if I wanted to plug a laptop in and then have two monitors come to life, some of these displays will allow you to plug the laptop into one monitor via Thunderbolt and then plug monitor one into monitor two via Thunderbolt. Like, literally plug those monitors into each other. Now, in practice, it's kind of like laptop docs, where it is finicky as heck, and oftentimes you'll come into it with like this very specific use case of you're like, oh, cool, this solves xyz. And then when you get down to it, like, it doesn't. Or it's kind of like flickery and sometimes doesn't work. It's really annoying. My take here is I probably wouldn't buy a monitor that has Thunderbolt because it sort of locks me into, like, I have to pay more for every one of these monitors now. And I don't really know that everything's going to work. I would rather consolidate that whole integration risk into a dock. And to be clear, docs have the exact same issue. And I'm talking to laptop users now. But docs have the same issue where it's like flip a freaking coin to know whether or not your laptop is going to work with these displays and all these peripherals. And that can be really frustrating. But I would rather consolidate that risk to a dock where I can like go out online and research other people that are using similar stuff to me, is this working for them or not? Then have all that risk baked into the monitor itself. So my take is I probably wouldn't pay more for a Thunderbolt monitor. I would just go with a dock to achieve the same functionality if I'm using a laptop, if you're using a deck, a desktop, a desktop workstation, I don't waste your money on on a display with Thunderbolt ports. In my mind, it doesn't really add any functionality that you'll use. If you're using Thunderbolt for something interesting, drop a comment there's going to be a lot of comments on this one. This stuff that the super nerds really come out for and get opinionated about you doing tax work. Right now you got a lot of 1040s. You're trying to get the door buddy. Have I got the app for you. Is this episode sponsor Soraband? If you do 150 or more 1040s a year, you need an AI 1040 intake automation solution. Vastly better than Cognito Forms or the paper organizer or anything that a practice management system has on offer. Right now with Sorban, you just dump all the docs that your clients are giving you into Sorban. It goes through a checklist of all the things that you should have for that 1040 based on pro forma data, automatically checks off all the items that are in those documents and gives you like an intelligent portal you can feel good about putting in front of your clients. That will save you a tremendous amount of time in organizing all the information that you're getting in and figuring out what you have and what you still need and following up with clients, automates, all of that stuff. A tremendous tax season time savings. We are in the thick of it and this is where Sorband's gonna save you a tremendous amount of time. I know tens if not 100 plus firms now that are very, very happy users. To learn more about Sorban, check out the link down in the show notes. Can we talk about a very real problem with most offshore staffing solutions? Actually faced this one myself is the staffing groups that serve as sort of like a middleman, a middles person between you and your staff. Like you pay the middleman and then they pay part of that to the staff person. Did you know in most setups there's actually no way to get that staff person out of that agreement? If you're like, I'm actually tired of Paying half the monthly cost to the middleman. Like half the money I'm paying is going to this company, not going to the person. Can I just work with that person directly? Most of those contracts, there's actually no way to get that person out of that employment agreement. That is why this episode sponsor Team up exists. They're an offshore staffing solution where you just, you work directly with that person. Team up, they're basically just going to serve as the recruiter and then after that you, there's no ongoing fees. Half of the money's not going to somebody else. You're just working directly with a talented human being. In the Philippines. The progression honestly for most accounting firms is they'll hire, you know, three to five folks offshore, have good luck and they're like, okay, what does it look like to go to 10 or 20? And they're like, I don't want half the money I'm paying to go to this other group anymore. I just want to pay these people directly. That's what Teamup will help you do. Find you somebody great for a one time flat recruiting fee. Actually founded by a former bookkeeping owner too, if that's something you want to explore. Learn more about Team up down in the link in the show. Notes consideration number six. Now remember, these are in order of importance. We're down to number six now. Aspect ratio and that is how wide is it relative to how tall it is? Now a lot of people swear by ultra wide monitors and the justification is, well, I can put X number of windows side by side. Here's my experience with that. Is for one an ultra wide display. It's a single point of failure if you do what I've done. I still remember doing this at work when I had an office. I just picked up the phone one day and the phone just barely clipped the edge of my display. And it was like this Dell Infini edge display that had like very thin bezels. It just barely clipped the edge of the display. Boom. Whole thing goes black. And that really nice monitor was just sprit. Like it was broken. And that stuff isn't covered under warranty if you have kids. Oh my gosh. I mean, I still remember my two year old boy at the time checking a remote at the TV in the living room and that thing just going dark and oh. You're like, I don't think they make screen protectors for big living room TVs, but they need to. So all I'm saying is if you're going all in on a single Monitor, that's, that's, it's a little more risky. But there's also the question of window management. Because if your argument is that that's an easier layout to manage Windows, then that only works if you are using some sort of additional window management software. And when I say window management, I mean like you know, having a window nicely snapped to one half of the screen or the other half of the screen. Native windows works fine with quadrants like snapping to halves or quarters. Anything beyond that, in my opinion, it's, at least in my experience, it's pretty useless. So you got to go out and like if you're running an ultra wide, just being able to snap something to one half of the screen or the other, that's not enough, man. You gotta be able to put a whole bunch of things side by side. And in my experience, when you go beyond a normal display, and a normal display resolution is 16 by 9 aspect ratio, but like ultra wides will go up to like, you know, 32 by 9 because they're super wide. In my experience, as soon as you go to a huge display like that, you just end up spending all day playing window management patty cakes. You are just like, okay, well now this, this window I'll always keep, or this apple always keeping this part of the window. And this, this apple always keeping this part of the window. The beauty of just having two normal monitors is all the snapping stuff built into Windows. It just works really easily and you're just not fussing with that stuff. Okay, am I old? Am I a Luddite as I describe this? Because there was a time where I was very into these things, as I'm sure some people listening to this were or still are. But that's my take right now. Consideration number seven, warranty. Warranties matter. But I've honestly, I don't think I've ever had a monitor just stop working that I didn't break through some sort of physical impact. And I have to be clear, I've broken a lot of monitors, but never in a way that a warranty was going to bail me out on. Biggest exception here is if you get an OLED display, then make sure you get one with a solid warranty that protects against burn. In consideration number eight, which you may not have thought about brightness or more technically luminance. These days, 250 to 350 nits is the norm. And this is basically just how bright will your display get? And this matters if you're in a very bright office or if the sun can shine directly on your display. I mean it's not unlike your phone, right, where it's not as big of an issue anymore. But back in the day you'd go out with your smartphone and if you're like on the beach, it'd be very hard to see what was going on on your phone. There's a big range here. So for example, the Apple Studio display, which is what I use now and it's just phenomenal. It goes up to 1600 nits. 1600 compared to the norm which is like 250 to 350 pretty. I don't. Not a subtle brag. I know. And you're probably like why in God's green earth do you need your display to be four times brighter than me? I don't know. But just something to consider in the room that you're in. That's a, that's a huge like TV buying consideration if your living room is very bright. But it matters to a degree with monitors too. Consideration number nine webcam. Is there a webcam built into the display? There shouldn't be. Stop it. And I know I just said Mac Studio display, but I'm generally not a fan of built in webcams because then I can't change the position of where the webcam is. I also don't like having a whole bunch of things built into one piece of hardware because if then the thing breaks, then the whole thing's kind of useless. Right? Same reason that I'm not into all in one PCs or all in one computers where it's like just a monitor but it has all the computer bits built into it. So you don't need a separate standalone, you know, workstation like a laptop or a tower for your desk. I'm not into webcams built into monitors. Last number 10 refresh rate. Stop trying to impress me with your 165Hz monitor when you work on spreadsheets all day, brother. Now if you do gaming on the same display, fine. Respect. Like you have a totally different set of requirements than the normal office worker. But then you got to look at stuff like G Sync support, freesync support. But if you are just doing office work, refresh rate doesn't matter. Like that response time, not a big deal for the day to day office stuff. I would love to hear your hot takes on monitor things. I just alienated a lot of people. And if there's any specific models that you're a big fan of that you feel like are kind of the sweet spot between like being premium because I do think if you're spending all this time looking at a display, like, we gotta think of our eyeballs. Like, my vision has gotten so much worse in the last five years. Let's make this as easy as possible for your peepers. Like, like, treat those eyes with something nice to look at. You deserve it. Same thing I tell my wife when she's ignoring me. We won't get into that. All right, we got a 15 million accounting firm to take a look at. Let's do it. Roast, affirm, Roast a firm. Let's roast. This brave soul. They submitted these details anonymously via our little intake for intake form for basically getting your accounting firm coached. And I appreciate you doing this. It gives us all a chance to sort of put a. Put the coaching hat on and look at someone else's firm and be like, yeah, what, what should they do in that situation? What would. What next couple of steps would, would make sense if you want the chance to have your firm anonymously roasted, head on down to the show notes. We'll put a link to that intake form down there and we might just do the same with your firm. Here we go. This is a tax and accounting firm in a suburb of a big city in the US the person submitting this is a manager at a larger firm, which, by the way, that is inbounds because. Because what this is really going to look like is, is kind of like, how do I influence this firm and how do I have a positive impact on the people around me and the things that our firm is stuck with? So whether you're a small firm and you're the owner, or whether you're a firm and you work inside of a firm and you see the issues of the firm and kind of wondering, like, what do I do? How do I kind of push the whole business in a positive direction? All that stuff's inbounds. Now. The firm doesn't really specialize in anything they said, though they do a fair bit of 11, 20h. And I was today years old when I learned, and maybe I just forgotten this, that homeowners associations have their own tax form. Nothing like tax to make you feel like an idiot. After doing tax for 20 years, when you find something new, you're like, how did I not know that that was a thing? They just like never seem to stumble upon it. So they do a bunch of different stuff. No real specializations, but they do quite a few. Homeowners association, they said those are. Those are easy at 250 to 300 each. Hold up that's 250 bucks for a homeowners association tax return. Okay, so their role is they're a manager. They're also the young guy in their office. So they end up doing a bunch of it. Approximate annual revenue 12 to 15 million. I wonder if they actually know what that number is. For sure they might not. So they're the the firm is in a very rich affluent suburb. Minimum income to live, there's probably six figures. Most of their clients make at least 150 to 200k. They have 45 employees, four partners, six admin staff and the rest accountants of various experience levels. We hire attempts sometimes during tax season. We have a tax season intern sometimes. My good friend, I have news for you. You do not work in a $15 million firm. It's probably a like a five to eight million dollars firm pricing generally a small S corp will pay two to three thousand dollars annually for everything. Everything is built in an hourly rate. Entry level accounts are 150 to 180 an hour. I'm two 10 an hour managers I've never manager managers are two 50 to 300 an hour and partners are 300 to 400 an hour. Managing partner is four 50 but he is a killer and works a lot of hours and has multiple revenue streams and multiple businesses. Ooh. Okay. So pretty traditional hourly billing firm and a reasonably large market. How our clients build nothing upfront we will normally just bill the whip. So the time at the end of a project they usually write down entry level staff time. We try to keep 1040s consistent. If they were 500 bucks last year they are 525 to 550 this year. WIP is taken from practice CS bless recording time is the worst part of our job. This is a great example of quote unquote hourly billing that is not hourly billing as evidenced by if they were $500 last year, they are 525 to 550 this year. Then what are we tracking time for? I'm joking. Kind of only a little bit. A quick aside here. If you are going to take up the the challenge of trying to get the firm that you work for like a firm like this off of hourly billing. The place to start is in the place where you can get the easiest wins small projects and so you think about the small bite sized things. You can test stuff like 1099. Let's say you do a bunch of 1099 for your clients come up with a more volume like closer to flat fee approach to billing folks for 1099 what I did was. And this actually became very important for us because what I didn't want was like $70 1099 projects or like a client being like, hey, can you handle our 1099 for us? Then you go through their entire bookkeeping file and I'm having to fix a bunch of things and get to the end. And you have to issue 11099 back to the owner of the company for renting out their home office, a self rental. And then you're like, well, that's $960 of whip. Here you go, client. 960 bucks for that one 1099 we just issued you. And that was actually our advice to do a self rental. And they're like, hold on a minute. We went to flat pricing on 1099 because we wanted to set a higher floor for the minimum size project that we were willing to take on. And so that was an example of like a small bite sized project we did every year for clients where we could, instead of doing hourly work, do flat fee work. And the goal in a situation like this is to prove out your hypothesis for the powers that be. And the really hard thing in an environment like this is you have four partners, right? And they're in all likelihood like to a degree, the gray hairs. And they have kind of a mutual respect for each other. But. But the rest of the team is just perceived, I wouldn't say as second class, but when you bring your ideas to the table, they're not given the same level of authority as the other partners. And at the end of the day, if you're trying to change somebody's mind on something, what they really need to hear is that idea and that concept from someone that they respect, someone that they maybe look up to a bit, or someone that at least is coming from a similar position as them. And if you work for those people, it makes it hard for a lot of these partners to then like put you on a pedestal and see you as equal with them because you don't have the same experience that they do. Right? And this is one of the things that's really powerful about people like this, just meeting other people who also run firms. If they can see into another firm that's finding success with something, for most of them, that's all the proof that they need. But if it's someone that works for them, that's like, hey, we should come do we should, we should do things this way. They're like, what proof do you have? Like, you don't run a firm like you've Worked for me your whole career. How do you know that even works? Can you tell? This is something that I experienced, something that was actually really helpful for me as I was building a network as I would just like get partners on a call with other people that were doing cool things. So this is around the time that I was like coming into ownership of my firmware, trying to make some hard changes. We get stuck on something. I knew somebody that had navigated the same problem. I would get that person onto a call with members of my team and then I was like, oh, okay. So like they seem very sharp. They actually seem pretty smart. And I can see how they did this. And now it's like for whatever reason, now I believe you sort of thing. So if you're trying to get away from hourly, start with like the small bite sized version of this. But then also if you've got pushback from people, give them a plan for the downside. Like the way that I navigated this when we moved 1800 1040s a year to upfront billing was there was still an off ramp if WHIP came in way too high. And so what would be the big concern if you do switch to flat fee? Well, what if something changes a whole bunch? We do all this extra work, then we don't get paid for it because we already gave them a price. All right, how do we protect ourselves against that? Well, when we give them an upfront price, we make it clear that this assumes that the scope was the same as last year. And if it's not, we'll have a conversation around scope change and then you need some sort of trigger to know if that conversation needs to happen. In our case, that trigger was if whip came in 25% over what we expected it to be. So basically, if whip was 125% of what it was last year, then there was probably a scope change there. We, and we at least need to look into it before we auto bill the project out at the price we gave them upfront. Very hard thing to do in a firm like this where you've got a bunch of decision makers like to get them all kind of swimming in the same direction. It's a hard thing. You're not going to do it across the board all at once. But that's where like you go to one partner that's most open to it and you get these kind of bite sized wins and then you can show like, here's what we build out for all these 1099 projects and here was the actual whip and here's the profitability of that in aggregate. That's another really tough thing to get people's minds around is that the most important thing to the business is the profitability of projects in aggregate on altogether, not individually. And this may initially seem unfair, that it's like penalizing the more organized clients or something like that. But at the end of day, there's nothing more important than the profitability of the entire business. And it makes it important to then get away from splitting hairs over every single client because that collectively saves the business time when we do that and makes all of the work all done together more profitable. And so we even just look at 1099, for example. That's something where you could test that. Look at the profitability of all the 1099 projects that you pulled into that model and validate. Here was the profitability compared to what it would have been had we just built out time. Now, it's hard because even that can be gamed. Like you said, you write off a bunch of junior time or something like that. But change management like this, it is a game of figuring out, like, what's the version of this that the people around me will get behind that they will agree to, Right? And it won't be the perfect version. This is the biggest problem with accounting firm leadership is everybody goes out and they say, here's the perfect way to do this thing. And you hear that and you're like, I can get that in theory. But I'm over here and I work with a lot of people that are not going to change overnight. So what's step one? Because that's probably step, like 17. I just need to know what the next step is. And that's all that we're looking for. Here is the next step. I had a really talented person come and work for me one time and they were like, I got this idea. Next day I got this idea. I got all, all these great ideas. And I'm like, I love this. Keep this energy. But the unfortunate reality is this is a big ship to steer. And the more important thing than like that perfect model is understanding the model that we have today, the human beings that we have working with us today. And what is the next step we can take those human beings to like, that is. That's all we can do. That should be the focus. 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. Verdo 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, 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 Thomson Reuters Virtual Office know a lot of people, they're very happy Baro users. In fact the average response time from Baro support if you come to them with an issue is now less than 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. Hey, real quick. Some very cool new updates were just shipped by one of the leading practice management systems in my app recommendations this episode sponsor Financial Sense so if you do bookkeeping work or client accounting work, this is worth checking out. They're building some month end close automation features and into the practice management system. So stuff like handling uncategorized transactions, flagging transactions without payees without class, without location expenses and bills without attachments, inconsistent expense classification, large transactions. IT will now flag all of these items inside of a month end close in Financial Sense because it's syncing the actual Ledger data from QuickBooks Online to Auto flag these items. Really cool. Some stuff that you've only seen to date really in like dedicated workflow tools. Financial Sense now, which is a practice management system is pulling some of the best of that workflow into the platform so you can do it all in one place. Pretty cool stuff. And I got a discount code for you if you sign up for their team or scale annual plans with two or more users, you can use code Jason10 to get 10% off. That is financial sense. Doing some cool bookkeeping automation stuff. To learn more about them, check out the link down in the show notes. All right, how do you get new clients? Mostly referrals. They said they personally brought in 160k of new business last year. Yikes. We have a lot of bankers and financial advisors who refer us business once they walk in the door or call us. They are a client. We have a good reputation. We have clients sign engagement letters up front and annually with their 1040. A little bit of a risk here of like you, you. If you end up in a spot where you're winning all the business usually means we're underpricing what we do. So in an environment like this, you can definitely have a lot of machismo and chest beating around like I win every client. When in practice, winning every client usually just means giving more away than the next firm down the street for the same or less money. Don't want to find yourself in that situation. So there should be. I mean if you think of it through the lens of profit optimization, there's a lot of folks that will come onto your firm and would have said yes to a number that was twice as big. Like that's, that's the truth. They will join the firm and the number they're paying is actually way less than what their ceiling was. And so if you, if you just think about this through like an engineering lens, just very tactically of what approach would yield the biggest profit number. Like you know, human emotion, what's right. Put all that stuff aside. What would yield the biggest profit number? It's probably pricing. That has over 50% of people saying no. Right. And so if, if more than 50% of people are not saying no to your price right now, it probably means that that price is not high enough. So be careful getting suckered into trying to win every single client, priding yourself in vanity metrics. And I'm not saying that's what you're doing. I'm just saying that's what I've done in the past. I added X number. I mean I, I built a cast practice to 1 1/2 million ARR in 18 months. And I was really proud of that and it was the least happiest time in my life. So especially when you've got the big bosses and you're probably trying to, you know, show that you can do it and sort of win the game inside of that firm, just be careful not to get sucked into the Wrong game. All right, what tech are they using? Buckle up. Thompson Reuters full suite. Heck yeah. Office365 for email and calendar, a bit of teams messaging. We have an initial paper file for tax prep and then back end scanning, backend scanning, back end scanning. My mind goes to somebody sitting on the copier, right? Yours did too. Don't act like it didn't. QuickBooks and QuickBooks Online. For bookkeeping, file sharing we use share file or net clients cs. Okay. A share file is a fine bolt on if you're using the Thompson Reuters suite because it's, it's an okay like professional looking way to exchange information. Ooh, that's a rough tech stack. Really is the most important tool to like. The most important alternative to find is a modern practice management system. At a firm your size, you're realistically probably only looking at carbon or canopy, maybe count Q o u n T but almost certainly carbon or canopy. The trouble is that's a really, really big change and there's like no modern tech to be found here. And if you want so if you want a smaller win for you, the easiest path would probably be a 1040 intake automation tool. So the leaders right now are Sorban, Stanford Tax and Trusts. It is not hard to set those up and bolt those on. You can test them out with a few clients with the exception of Sorban I think which has 150 client minimum. But that will save you a ton of time on individual tax work. And it's so easy to bolt on that it's a great way to get an E like an initial win and hopefully a little more momentum and enthusiasm around a larger scale tech change. Again, this is a situation where if you can find another firm that's similar to yours that is using a modern practice management system and then that firm can show your leadership the benefits of using a better platform. That's the best way to convince them because oftentimes you can tell them until the end of the day until the cows come home, but until they see someone else that's more like them having success with it. It's going to be tricky for them to buy in. Now what is especially painful right now, hiring is a PETA. Nobody wants to work in an office anymore. People want more flex hours. We are not nine to five, Monday to Friday during non tax season. During tax season typically it's 55 to 60 required hours including Saturdays, which are kind of flex days for sure over capacity. But that's why the partners make big bucks. No issues with peers. Typically we all try to help each other out. We have a lot of team building events mostly consist of sporting events and drinking though. Hey, sounds like a great lifestyle. 55 to 60 hour weeks, partners probably pulling more. And the way you unwind is drinking together. I don't see that going sideways at all. Yes, hiring for a firm like this, very, very hard. Everything that you're describing is not something that is exciting for, I would say the next generation of accountants. And even as you're submitting this, I can get a bit of this from you that you're like, yeah, maybe not the most fun environment. Being great for a specific type of employee is just like being great for a specific type of client. Know who you're for, build the firm experience to be tremendous for a specific type of person. Uh, obviously there's fewer people than ever out there in the wild to come and work for your accounting firm. And it's not enough anymore. You can't expect people anymore just to be happy to have a job. Like the power has gone back, swung back to the employee side. You're not entitled to the next hire anymore. And so you kind of got to think like, why would somebody come and work for us instead of somebody else? And it's so easy when you're in an environment like this to get brainwashed into thinking you're the only firm in the universe and that you are the best firm in the universe. Where in this market there are 500 other accounting firms that frankly the folks in your firm don't know anything about. And so we don't know enough to know if we are even the best at this stuff. And I can tell you, the folks that are looking for a job certainly can't tell. But when you describe like being in an office all day every day and working really long hours, like, I don't know, gang, like those to a degree, those days feel kind of like they've come and gone, right? So that's going to be a tough firm to continue to staff. Last couple of details. I don't like recording time and dealing with billing. I love talking to people on the phone, retirement planning, consulting and being their personal cfo. Don't do a lot of bookkeeping anymore, but sometimes it feels good to put in earbuds and jam out for a few hours on bookkeeping. That sweet, sweet little noise that QuickBooks Desktop makes in the register, right. I don't like time tracking. Step one is moving to upfront pricing. Now there's a question around, like, do you ever move away from, from Time tracking in my, my take here is I want to track time just to keep a pulse on how everybody's doing, not to use it as a stick and not to base price based on time. Because the people buying your services could care less how much time you spent on something. All that matters is how much they value the outcome, which has nothing to do with how much time it took you. I actually left the decision of should we still track time down to my team. And they wanted to like the culture we had built at that point. Time was not something that was being used against them. They wanted it because it was one of a number of metrics that were important to measuring how we were doing on our projects and looking out for our teammates and stuff like that. Like, to pretend that time is not a thing, especially in a remote work environment where we don't always see, like, is that person working way too much. Like, like we pretend time doesn't matter. Time matters. Like it, it really does. Doesn't mean that you need to and you shouldn't price your work based on time, but time still matters. Like, if I'm employing people and they are sitting at a desk X number of hours a day looking at their crappy monitors, I like, I feel like a moral obligation to have an understanding of like, are they doing okay? How many hours are we working this year versus last year? And then also, like, are there any projects that are way out of whack, who's crushing it so that they can, they can sort of teach the rest of the team? Is there anything that they're doing different? But I would say the, the bigger issue with time, I think why people usually despise having to track time is 1, the expectation is it's done in too granular of a way. And two, it's scary. It's this intimidating thing. They are constantly under the gun. And that is why the time thing is, is just not a fun experience. Thank you for the submission. If you want to have your firm anonymously roasted, check out that link down in the show notes. We just might do the same. Ding dong. Hang on. That's the mailman. Hang on. This segment is called Mailbag. These questions were submitted via email, via social media, YouTube comments, via telephone. Send me a text at 1-516-980-4968. My email is Jason. Jason on firms.com here's the first question. Hey, Jason, quote unquote, met another local firm through comments on your posts. Now we're co pitching a client where one of us preps the Reviewed financial statements and the other serves as the bookkeeper. Think we can help each other within a specific niche? Never would have happened without you. Thank you gang. I can't tell you how much serendipity. Serendipity happens when you're just out there like. And the most dumb places like, how are you even going to describe this to somebody? Like, yeah, my business kind of exploding this year because I posted on a YouTube video and I met somebody down there. Kind of like early online dating when people were like, ooh, cringe, you guys met online. I feel like the new professional version of that is like we met. Yeah, we met in the, we met in the comments of YouTube video. I don't know. He's just perfect. He completes me because I don't do a test work. What pages do you recommend to have on a bookkeeping website? Sounds like services and an about us page don't really bring value. What is more essential? Thanks again. A hundred percent. I'm not real big on the About Us page on a website because people are selfish and they're only coming to your website to figure out what you can do for them. Your mom will think it's cool, but like the people that I'm trying to attract to my firm, I generally won't care. Also services. Not a big fan of presenting a list of services because that commoditizes what you're doing. If they just think they're buying bookkeeping, then they'll go and price shop your bookkeeping or your tax prep or whatever it is to other people. We're trying to escape that commoditization. So what pages then are most important to have on a bookkeeping website? Here's how I think about it. I actually think all you need is a landing page, a single page. The more important thing to think about is not what pages should I have, but what resources should I have. How can we give them value as quickly and clearly as possible? And so a lot of people, they will have a lead magnet on their website. A lead magnet is basically just something free they can download in exchange for their email address or something like that. So I want to get them to value delivery and like the next step of trust with me and my brand as quick as possible. And, and you don't do that by having a 15 page website gang like you really don't. So I would much prefer a single page website that's really just a landing page. And you think about how people got there. The more context you have, the better. So for example, if I was going to tell you I just made a website that will give you app recommendations for accounting firms. I would then give you the landing page for, for the part of my website that does just that. And the hero copy is going to be, hey, you're in the right place. Here's some account app recommendations and then here's how to get the resource and exchan for email. If you got a bookkeeping website and you're trying to go after plumbers now and you go out and you give a talk at a conference or something like that, or go on a big podcast, you could for sure stand up a standalone landing page just for those people so that when they come to it, it's very contextual to the things that you said. But if we got to pair this back to like just a single landing page for your website, we want to immediately call out who we want to serve. So that is, you know, plumbers, but even go more specific than that. But then immediately get straight into what's the most universally useful resource you can give them. And I'm not big like the 15 step financial checkup. Like that doesn't solve a specific problem. If we go back to app recommendations for accounting firms, that's my most popular thing after we've test millions of things because you know how painful it is and how scary it is to like make this big investment in tech and not know if it's the right thing or not. And so we found what is ultimately our best top of funnel. Here we are talking a bunch of accounting firm strategy. But the way the most people find me is text selection. That stuff also performs best on YouTube and I wish it wasn't that way. But tech videos and AI videos will get five to 10 times the traffic as anything else. So you got to find your version of that what is the juiciest thing for them. And then you're providing them value direct on the website in exchange for their email address for hopping on a call. Something like that. And, and the more pages we add actually the more that we're asking people to do like that becomes a whole archeology thing of then them like going through your library of of pages on your site and like finding the thing that they need instead let's just cut to the chase, like get to the the most important thing, something of value that you can give them and a single next step. And honestly only once you've got that performing and that's working, would I look at adding more pages. Good question though. Thank you for the question. Hey, Real quick, I want to invite you to my super excellent weekly newsletter. My newsletter was like the start of my thought leadership journey. It's where I try to collect what I think are the most important things for you to see every single week, sent to you every Wednesday morning. Make sure you don't miss any of the good stuff. Right? Increasingly we're also building into that some like of the best evergreen thought leadership I've ever done. Kind of make that like the most action packed, highest quality email you get to your inbox each week. Because listen, we're all busy, all right? You're not going to see every single little thing that I put out. Goodness sakes, there's just too much. If you're not on my newsletter yet, check that out jasononfirms.com or I'll put a link to it down in the show notes. Hey, quick word from one of today's sponsors. Me. Me. Yes, I run a community realize that is for accounting firm owners. And realize is kind of the secret behind how I've done all of my content and been able to like financially turn thought leadership into a business. About 100 firm owners in there realize is a systematic way to build connections with other peer firm owners. It's not a framework for how to run a firm. It's a way to introduce you to other super cool firm owners. Right now we're putting together small groups so you can have a group of like 5, 6, 7 other firm owners just like you that you meet with every single month run very similar firms. Having this for me totally transformed firm running my North Star like my goal for you coming into this group is to make a new best friend, somebody that runs a firm because that was what I needed in my journey. The whole community is built around that. It's called realize link down in the show notes if you want to learn more real quick. I want to get into some accounting firm org charts. I actually think this is really important because a lot of the ails that an accounting firm faces are just from not having the right makeup of people. So for example, when I saw $15 million accounting firm and then I saw six admin staff, immediate reaction that's way too low. Now they're not actually a $15 million firm but what I want to do is coach a few org charts to just kind of walk through. Here's the next hire that I would make in your situation because I think by and large most accounting firms are too reliant upon expertise and oftentimes we hire in a way that sets the owner up for failure because it ends up putting too much on them. And I know those two things sound mutually exclusive. Exclusive. Like what do you mean? You want me to hire less senior people but then somehow take more work off the owner's plate? That's what I want to get, what I want to dig into. So send me your org chart, email it to me, text it to me, whatever you can. I mean, just explain it. We'll cruise through a few of those and figure out who the best next hire is. I wish there was an easier way to like visualize. I know you could go into like a whiteboard sort of thing, but that's just work. Wish there was like a quick and dirty way you could. You could throw together an org chart. Tell you what's been turned on its head lately. Is my family org chart because recently asserted at the top of it very clearly my 8 year old daughter. Geez Louise, is. Is 8 different than 7. Got my 8 year old daughter at the top. Quite a ways down from there is my wife. I'd say my wife has two direct reports. Myself and my seven year old son. Four year old son reports up to the seven year old. And I could tell you skip levels from me up to my daughter are not encouraged at the moment. But I want to see what your firm's org chart looks like. Send it over. Could be a fun conversation. Question I got over text. You have a cool pegboard wall behind you in the videos. Where did you get it? I do. At least it looks like I do, right? Wrong. What you see behind me is as paper thin as the entirety of this Internet grift. This is just a set that we had a carpenter come in and build based on some visual references. That's not even real. That's not even real pegboard. It is flimsy. As I'll get out one of these days, that sucker is going to follow. It's simultaneously extremely flimsy, but also unbelievably heavy. Not sure how that works, but that is not actual pegboard. I do think you can get. Well, I don't know if you even buy the actual pegboard stuff that you see in the wild. Sometimes you just need like some plywood and then a hole cutter. Really. But no, what you see behind me, it's. It's not real. All of this is fake. Next up, what do you think about the idea of instead of listing package prices on my website, I list maybe three to five examples of current client pricing and what it includes? I love that idea. That is better than packages. I think we covered this in maybe a couple episodes ago. Don't present packages on your website and don't present packages with pricing on your website. If you present packages, it looks like that's the only collection of things that you will sell. People and folks will go in there and find stuff that they don't need and they're like, oh, if they're not going to customize for me, I don't want to waste money on this package. Everybody hates that stuff. Example I always come back to is like buying home Internet and they make you have a home phone line. Like, there's no way to buy it without the home phone line. You may be completely happy with the price, but if the home phone line's bundled, bundled in there, you're like, oh, this is a waste because I'm paying for this too. Right? People do the same thing when they come to your website and they see canned packages. So instead, put up some great client examples. Not your minimums, the clients, the type of clients that you want to do more work with, what that fee range looks like and what are the things that you're doing for them. And then you get the added benefit of when that person comes along, they'll be like, oh, that person actually sounds like me. This must be the firm for me. And voila. You've avoided the whole problem of putting minimum prices up. And then everybody's like, oh, yeah, I'm pretty sure my price is going to be the minimum. And you haven't locked into any expectations around, like explicit packages. So, yes, I love that idea. Hey, Jason, I think I might switch proposals from Ignition to Canopy. I've already been a user of both for over a year. Have you put out any thought leadership on their new proposal revamp with three tiered proposals? I've seen a bit of it. It just doesn't go as far as Ignition goes. At the end of the day, I will say what's really nice. And Canopy is the stuff that's built into the proposal. Like, those work items can then be invoiced individually and you can like apply time to those work items that are on the invoice. Ultimately, it comes down to what is your needs specifically and how you send proposals. So, like, it just takes some testing. Like, are there specific features in Ignition that you really, really need that Canopy doesn't do? That's pretty firm specific. So I don't know that I could tell you that. That being said, you know, my take here is that there is no screen that we need to put. There's no more important screen than the proposal screen. Like if there's anywhere in your firm that you're going to pump in additional effort, it needs to be the screen where the client says yes to a price. So if there's any risk of leaving money on the table by not using the best tool for you, I don't think it's worth it. But operationally, some real nice benefits to keeping that inside your practice management system. I've started taking on increasingly complex clients. We're using Financial Sense as our practice management system, but the clients who have multiple businesses, the visibility into client statuses is getting increasingly murky. I need something that can handle five, 10 or even 20 businesses under a single client dashboard. I'd be, I'd be a little surprised if you couldn't do that inside of Financial Sense. I would say talk with a Financial Sense implementer, like maybe ask support if you haven't already. But they don't always know like Best practices. Talk with an implementer. If you have any other friends that use Financial Sense, that's where that can be really handy. Otherwise like Financial Sense has a ceiling. Like in terms of firm sizes where they're great for like I would say that ceiling is probably you get over 30 staff and financial Sense probably isn't the move. Canopy and Carbon are really the ones that are more set up for like larger firms. The fact that you have big client groups doesn't necessarily mean that you're a big firm. But that would surprise me if Financial Sense didn't have a view you could create that that made that sort of good enough. Also I wouldn't assume that the next tool up the up the ladder could do the same either. So if you know any folks using Canopy or Carbon, those would be good questions to ask as well. Like how do they do that? Sometimes it's just a non intuitive way to put something together in a tool is the solution. Hey Jason, what help can you provide on structuring bonuses for junior bookkeepers as well as lead bookkeepers? We actually just published a YouTube video of really cool story of a bookkeeping shop lady is doing 440 grand in revenue a year, has two part time employees, launched the firm when she was raising her kid. Like just a really cool story that's over on the YouTube channel. One of her questions was how to do better kind of incentive based pay with her bookkeepers. Like they were getting a percentage of revenue. And there's basically three approaches to this that I've seen. There is the super basic version where you have a single person responsible for the entire project and they get a flat percentage of production, usually 30 to 40%. The upside of that is it's really simple and the profit calculation is dead simple. The downside of that is there's just not that many people, people that you would really want doing an entire project from end to end. Either they're too senior to do the menial aspects of it, or they're too junior to be able to be accountable for quality assurance. It also means that you can only hire people with skill up to like the ceiling of what's required, you know, doing good quality assurances. So you don't really have a pipeline of folks that you're then pulling through your system. So that's the first approach that's very simple. Some folks do that and they only ever hire senior people and that's it. The second approach I've seen is you have a shared quality assurance person across a team of bookkeepers. And through some flat mechanism or maybe measuring how the, the quality assurance person spends their time, bookkeepers get sort of a base profit share, but then that's reduced by how much time the quality assurance person spends on their work. So it's a bit of a balance of both worlds. But I would argue you still don't have a clear pipeline for like junior people to support staff level and senior people. The third version of this is where you build everything into kind of a pod. And so in that pod you've got junior people, you've got staff, staff level people, you've got senior level people. Everybody is delegating work down to the, the folks that can support them in the team. They learn delegation much, much faster. They upskill much faster because they're getting exposed to different types of tasks. The main downside is the profit share is just more involved, the calculation becomes more complicated and more, more clunky. And the real upside of production based pay is like you want people to feel like their efforts really make a difference in the money that hits their pocket. And the more complicated and convoluted that calculation becomes, the less connected their inputs feel from what they get paid. But I would say that is the best path towards like upskilling a team faster, which should probably be the biggest goal. Like what's the thing that's best for our team? And can we have a diversity of talent coming through at both senior and junior levels? Because that is ultimately what will craft your future senior level folks. If like, if the vibes are good too, like there's also some fun to be had in kind of that team based approach where when you're crushing it, everybody wins. Two more questions. This isn't a question. Bring back dolphin noises. Dolphin noise. We use that when I would curse on my, my YouTube videos. Well, about 50% of the time is when I would curse. 50% of the time is when I would say, you know, farts or I think it's funny to bleep things that aren't actually bad words. Like, get your hands out of that. Are you all. That was all just bleeped out, right? But what I said was, get your hand out of the pickle jar, you mothball. I've been dialing back the cursing. I know a lot of you that listen to the podcast. You've got like your kids in the car and stuff like that. And I know this because you tell me how much your kids and your partner complains and all of that. Like, there's a lot of people near to the people that listen to this podcast who do not like me. A few of them came out to my workshop events last year and I got to meet them. That was a lot of fun. But if that's you and you're listening to this right now, I don't. I don't know, man. Maybe the problem is you just haven't gotten into accounting yet. Okay, time to taste the rainbow. All right, last question. I'd like to start my own bookkeeping firm this year. My goal is to start out as a side hustle until I can get to the point to take it full time. My concern is that I currently work as an employee for another firm that is visible online. Am I obligated to tell my boss that I'm starting this side hustle? My concern is if I tell them, I could put my current job at risk. How do I market my side hustle? When my LinkedIn shows my employment with my current job. Great question. I got to split that out into two questions. Am I obligated to tell my boss that I'm starting this side hustle? At the end of the day, everybody's got to look out for number one. Like that is kind of the. The first and foremost consideration there, especially if you got a family and stuff like that. But I do think it's beneficial for all parties involved if you can find a way to be transparent. There's certain people where their path is just going to take them to running their own thing. And hopefully you work for a person where being able to have a frank conversation about that will be better for everybody because the worst thing for them is when they have a really good person, a person that's capable of doing their own thing leave like they are cooked at that point. That's a really hard thing. And so in a perfect world, you can have a frank version of that conversation. Now, there's very little risk when I say this and somebody's going to go do it and they're going to be like, thanks a lot, Jason, choose your own adventure here. But most people, if a very senior person comes up to them and says, I'm going to leave, the response is going to be, how long can I keep you? Because I want to keep you as long as possible. The response is probably not going to be, oh my gosh, how dare you leave today. That's very rare. There will be some people who are that vindictive, but not many of them. So hopefully you can get to a point where you can have a frank conversation here. There's a lot of people, I mean, there's a lot of folks in my audience who have these employees and it turns out great and they can send them with some clients and the firm gets paid for those clients when they go. And like, that's a, that's, you can sort of let them leave with your blessing. That is a totally real and normal thing, I would say, in like modern accounting firms. But yes, I can understand how that could be risky if you get that frank. Now, how to build a side hustle firm when externally, like your LinkedIn shows you're. You're currently employed somewhere else. There are so many platforms where you can build an accounting firm. Like LinkedIn is not the only answer for sure, if you are showing up other places. There are, there are so many platforms that are big enough in a vacuum on their own for you to build an accounting firm. Also, you can also do this stuff offline. Like it's going to be hard to be turning up at a bunch of events and all that if you're working for somebody else. But there are still more people that build businesses offline than build businesses online. And sometimes I have to remind myself of that when I'm just like at my wit's end with social media. It's like, you don't have to win social media to have a business. It can certainly help, but there's all sorts of offline things that you can do that are, that are much more valuable. So say you just have to find the path that is not LinkedIn dependent. Now is it okay for you to Visually show up on other platforms like is. Does that create any risk? If you can, that's great because I mean those platforms can help you build and you do want to kind of get to like that critical mass before you go. Other approaches here you can buy a small book of business, do a seller financed book of business and that can be a way to pay the bills initially like that. That can de risk the process of going out on your own. You could also do a deal with somebody else where maybe they're starting a firm or you work with them on contract to be making some money while you try to build your own thing. So your solution, it could be just a cobbled together version of a few of those different things. There are a lot of people that are in need of like a really good contractor to kind of fill some gaps and you can be clear that like I just need a temporary thing and there's a lot of situations where that'll work totally fine. So if you can build on other platforms, try that. If you can find another way just to cash flow, it worth worth considering that like, like buying a small book or working for a couple other firms on contract while you're in the process of building your book. Because you really don't like. If you know that you're going to do this, you don't want to, don't like. You will not regret making the decision sooner than later. There's never going to be a day where you feel ready and when it feels safe, like you will always feel like you're just making it up along the way. That's kind of the best and worst part of entrepreneurship. But if you're going to do it, do it. And keep us posted how it goes. Gang, thank you for being here. You got any questions or stuff you want to talk about, drop a comment. Which bit of your office furniture do you want me to attack next? Your chair? Your keyboard? Your mouse? Appreciate you coming and getting smarter today. Never been a better time to work in accounting firms than now. Honestly gang, there are so many cool small firms doing amazing things, creating amazing places to work for people and also folks who are in bummer situations that are getting into entrepreneurship for the first time and just creating kind of their dream job, working for themselves. And regardless of which one of those you are, I want to see you back next time. Until then, I'll see you in the next one.