585 The Magic 3:1 Ratio in Accounting Firms

Today on the podcast, how do you know if your accounting firm's team is the right size? Like, do you just keep hiring or should you contract? Like, is it actually the work of the clients that are the problem? That's a really hard thing. Cause you could see a world where you build this big old bloated company that's not really making much money. But when you're in the thick of it, in the weeds, how do you know what to do next? Grow or contract? I've got an interesting framework that I think will help you navigate that. But also today, we're looking at a very real bookkeeping practice. They found themselves in the middle of a super cool niche, but are bumping into some problems. We're going to dig into that. Also. We're covering how to buy an accounting firm, how to cut through all the AI noise in the software marketing right now, whether we should be charging clients for initial consultations, and how to build a niche that you don't even exist in yet. Like, you don't even have one of those clients yet. We're covering a lot of ground today. Let's do it. If you're new here, welcome aboard the SS Jason on Firms podcast, where we just talk about running better accounting firms. It's kind of as simple as that. This is a podcast for people, whether you're an owner of an accounting firm or just a person in accounting firm. In an accounting firm that just wants to, like, get comfortable with accounting firm strategy because these businesses are just rad businesses. In 2026, there are very few businesses that give you the flexibility and the, like, money upside that an accounting firm does. It really is kind of amazing. And today where we're going to start is on what is one of the biggest questions you will face in an accounting firm. What's the right size team for what we're trying to do? Almost everyone, and this isn't even an accounting firm thing, but any sort of business owner, they have all had that moment or they do that thought experiment where they were like, maybe it's on a particularly low day where they were like, I'm kind of ready to burn this down right now. What if I ju. What if I like, what would it look like to cut half of my customers? Maybe cut half my staff? I'm pretty sure that I could do that and still make the same money. Like, if you've run a business, you know that you have found yourself there before. And honestly, the sad truth is for most accounting firms, you could do this. You could cut half of your clients. You could bump the prices 20% on the rest of your clients, and they would probably be thrilled because they would get more attention, see more of you, and actually be cared for. And isn't that, like, a more fun, more calm business to run? I could tell you the least fun period of my professional life was when I grew a bookkeeping practice from $0 to 1.5 million ARR in 18 months. And I. I know, sounds impressive, right? Great job, Jason. Listen, I was working my little buns off at the time because I thought it was really impressive, too. But I'll tell you what it wasn't. Was fun. And what happened next wasn't great. It was a whole lot of fat trimming. It was honestly kicking a lot of clients off the bus, kicking a number of staff off the bus who we had to hire because we were growing so fast that our standard for, well, what is a staff person that's good enough for us? Like, that standard kind of had to slip a little bit because we had to put some warm bodies into chairs. And the next 12 to 18 months after that, by the end of that, what remained on the client list and on the staff list was not only a bookkeeping practice that was more profitable. I think the revenue was about the same, but it was much more profitable. But the staff that were left, the clients that were left, I loved working with. They were great people. They were super, super capable people. But when we grew really fast, that was not the case. And you may find yourself in a spot where you look to your left and you look to your right, and you're like, I don't know that's the right person for this job, or this is all grown so fast, or we're at a point where I don't even know what's going on. Like, I don't even know if that person worked yesterday. I don't even know if that client's profitable. And it's in situations like that where we kind of got to hit pause and be like, you know, is the solution to this problem of you feeling busy, really hiring one more person and arguably making that whole thing worse? Right. I know. I know how that feels. Why are you crying? You're a grown man on an elliptical bike right now, crying. Stop it. Get yourself together, Kay. Four thoughts that I've got on this. It's the closest I've been able to get to, like, a framework for or a signal, an early warning, a canary in the coal mine for whether we should probably hit pause and stop hiring and Contract. The. The business. Spoiler alert. You'd probably agree with me on this. And this is an easier thing to see in other people's firms than in our own firms. I think probably 80% of firms. The answer is not to hire another person. It's to do something else. So four thoughts that I've got on this. Number one is that the golden ratio for what your highest paying client, your highest revenue client, and your lowest paying revenue client should be. So if I have a $30,000 a year client, I shouldn't have any clients that are less than $10,000 a year. I know you're doing the math already. You're like, crap, I'm doing the. I'm doing the little league coaches tax return for 80 bucks. Or I'm, you know, I'm doing the. Some sort of like vaguely mission oriented things work for this price. Or maybe the other end of the spectrum, you got this big dog, you got this huge client that you're like, yeah, we could probably figure this out, but it's like twice as big as anything else that you do. Right? You know that the more variety there is in who you're serving and what you're trying to do, the harder that business is to run, the more you're reliant upon expertise and people who have done that thing before rather than really being able to put this stuff on rails. We love to talk so much about systems and we kind of pride ourselves that you can't build systems when you're like serving all sorts of different types of people and doing all sorts of different types of things. When you've outrun what it is possible to build systems around you, you become reliant upon expertise. And it requires a lot of expertise to get that stuff done. Well, get that stuff done to your level. Why do I have to be the one to have every single monthly meeting with the clients? Like, there's nobody else around here that can do what I can do. And oftentimes that is because you are the only unicorn in the building and you've designed a business around you the unicorn. And that's usually how it starts. But to enable anyone lesser than a unicorn to successfully do delivery requirements requires changing the structure of the business and the expectation of what the client's going to get from you. And so what is the right answer for like, what sort of width of revenue band that ought to be? You could make an argument for a lot of different ranges. I'm honestly, like, this might feel restrictive to a lot of folks. I think this is pretty generous. This three to one ratio, there's actually a lot of people that would tell you that this revenue band ought to be tighter. So I'm saying three to one from the top, like highest paying projects down to your lowest paying work, that delta should be no bigger than three to one. Obviously you know the problems of there being clients on the list that are too small, but there are equally risks with clients being on the list that are too big. I shared this story before on the podcast when I came into ownership of an 80 year old tax firm and I ran the numbers, 70% by headcount of the client list accounted for, I think it was actually less than 20% of the revenue. Seventy percent of clients accounted for less than 20% of the Revenue. That's a great example of doing a lot of different types of things inside of one accounting firm and then struggling to realistically build systems and repeatability around the work that you're doing. Very hard business to run. Now, as I go through these points, you may be like, this feels what you're describing, I can understand it, it makes sense from a textbook standpoint, but that feels impossible from where I'm at right now. Most of us, we kind of sit back and we take what the universe sends our way. And so you're like, listen brother, like I'm running the best business I know how to run with what has walked through my door. Point number four is the solution to this. So know that we're gonna get there. So point number one, the golden ratio, one to three. Point number two, I only want new clients coming in at the top half of that revenue band. Common mistake here is if, even if you commit to this three to one ratio, you say, okay, we're taking projects between $1,000 and $3,000. Now our minimum is $1,000. No, no, no, no, no. That's not what I'm saying. Your minimum is usually an internal minimum. I guess there's two types of minimums. There's the minimum you would let a new client in the door at, and then there's the minimum that you would let an existing client stay on the bus at. If I want to keep my clients between 1 and 3,000, but I let new clients in at 1,000, it's going to skew our client base down to that 1000, when what we're really trying to do is skew it to be more premium over time. So I'm only letting in new clients at the top half of that revenue band, in this case between two and three Grand. All these numbers are made up. Plug your own numbers in there. And as we've talked about on the podcast before, don't advertise your minimums. Your minimums should not be on your website. What should be on your website is examples of the types of clients that you want to bring in. Whether these are real clients right now or not. I get a lot of questions from folks that are like, well, I don't have any of the clients like the ones I want yet, or I'm just getting started. These do not have to be real clients. Put examples on your website of like, here's an example. Engagement ballpark price for what it would be and make this for you like an A or B client example. Don't put the minimum. When we put the minimum, we attract a bunch of stuff that we actually don't want if we put examples. And we've got the added benefit of someone who comes by and they're like, oh, that's actually just like me. This must be the place for me now. If you're not doing a lot of that yet, that example has to be realistic. Like, it has to speak to a deep understanding of their problems. If you can illustrate that in your website, people will happily get out of the way and be like, oh my gosh, this person. They get it. Like, they understand what I do. But what doesn't achieve that is a minimum and a big old list of like accounting jargon, accounting services. That is what most firms do doesn't work. If a client does come in, their expectation is gonna be that there's work's gonna be pretty much the minimum or close to it. That's the last thing that you actually want. So point number two, new work coming in the door ought to be at the top half of that revenue band. Point number three is, is then within that band, it is your job to keep the breadth of services that you do to be as tight as possible. Because if you think about that, let's just stick with the 1,000 to 3,000. I mean, you could be selling like tax work, bookkeeping work, payroll work, dog grooming work, like all sorts of things under the sun within that revenue band. Just because somebody's paying that amount doesn't mean that it's work that you actually should be doing. So step number one is like, are we just like muddling with vastly different sized engagements? Step number two is how do we get like what we do in those engagements to be as similar as possible across them all? Both of these dimensions are equally important because you Know if all you did was one little very specific thing all day long, that's so much easier to build a process around and like staff and all of that. Like you look at other people's businesses where they will buy a business or run a business, like you know, a franchise or something like that, and it's like, they don't even have to be in the building more than a day, a month. And you're like, doesn't that look nice? Like how could I ever do that in an accounting firm? The reason that's really hard is a question of how easily systematizable is the stuff that we're doing. Most accounting work incredibly hard to systematize. But if we get to the point where we're speaking to a specific type of entrepreneur, I at a specific stage in their business, it is vastly easier to systematize. Now here's the rub. Here's where most people right now are like, I hear you, I get it. But like, that's just not my reality. I don't know how to get there. It's point number four. Everything that we're talking about here is achieved by yourself having better distribution. Distribution is the ultimate lever that controls how much power you have to, to be specific, distribution buys you the right to specialize. Most people are generalists by necessity. You're like, those are the clients that I have right now. Like those are the things that came to me. That is what I am right now. And so anytime like where you have a lack of distribution, you then have to fill the to do list with whatever you got. And it's kind of wild to think about how little has changed in accounting firm running in the last few years, decades. Like if you think pre Internet to how you would find a client, you're like, well, local connections, meeting people, going to chamber meetings, the notion of like being micro niche and being like, oh, I'm only going to work with endodontists or millennial taxidermists. You're like, well cool. Maybe you got one, hopefully two in town. If it's a big city, maybe you got five of those in town. You just couldn't do that, right? But that's still how most people build their accounting firm. Like our day to day things that we do haven't really been impacted by the Internet. Some of the software that we use is now in an Internet browser and that's great. But how we build connections with folks and find the next great client for most of us has not been impacted by the Internet really at all. Now for some of us, our own lives and maybe our own businesses have been transformed by the Internet. If you hang out on social media, if you make other friends, this might have changed your life. But even for many of those people, they are not yet reaping the same benefits of the interconnectedness of the world that the Internet has enabled. And this is, I mean this is one of few positive things I would say that the Internet has enabled is while it's kind of inherently a very divisive thing, it is creating spaces for folks with, with common ground where they can go and hang out. And I mean, and a real, for us example of this is being able to meet other accounting firm owners before the Internet. How would you have met other accounting firm owners? Like, you're gonna have three to five other accounting firms in town, depending on how big town is, and you're gonna be very competitive with them because you're all serving the same itty bitty pool of people inside of that business. So you're probably not gonna make friends with them. As opposed to now. 1500 people will listen to this podcast in the first 48 hours. Those are all folks that you would probably love to have a beer with. In fact, if you want to come to our workshop series in May and June, I wanted to get the ticketing up by now, but we haven't yet. Should be live in the next couple of weeks coming to 20 US cities. But the fact that now you can meet and hang out with other accounting firm owners, that unlocks all sorts of opportunities for you. Let's say you got clients, you got to refer, you can now send them to a good home like an accounting firm. This may be earlier on the journey. Then you likewise the other end of that spectrum. Somebody else's hand me downs right now would be great for you if you just met that firm. And so these connections are being made all over the world and they're being enabled by the Internet. They truly are. Like if it were not for the Internet, you would not know that I existed. And so whether we're leaning into it yet or not, it is impacting your life. But most of us are not wielding the opportunity of the Internet to, to do exactly what we're talking about here, be able to build a more specific, easier to run more profitable version of our business. We all have a distribution problem. I've shared before every video that we publish to the YouTube main channel. You know, if 10,000 people come and watch it in the first week in the metrics, half of those people will have never seen one of my videos before and I've been doing YouTube for three or four years now. Isn't that wild? Like isn't that, isn't that crazy? Like the world is so big, but most of us just like, we're not doing the day to day things that lean into us being able to build distribution when distribution is kind of the most important thing. Like if we come back to what are the, like Maslow's hierarchy of the most important things to the health of an accounting firm? It's not tech systems, client list, it's the other way around. It's client list, system systems than tech. Because all problems in an accounting firm are solved by the next new client who will pay you twice as much to do the same work. Bring that new client in, you can cut three legacy projects. Oh, all of a sudden capacity is looking better. I've got better balance. I can pay people better. Like everything comes down to the client list. So how do you build a better client list? We stop being professionally invisible, right? We can't spend 24 hours a day, heads down at the battle station, staring down those four monitors trying to get work out the door. Even if you're doing an amazing job on all of that work, the world doesn't know about it. Like that's kind of the bummer. Part of what we do is nobody ever sees what someone does one on one with a client. You could literally be the best person in the world at what you do. And if all you ever do is deploy that expertise with your clients, you'll like take care of them and a lot of them will probably appreciate you. Also, there will still be clients who don't think you know what you're saying. You could literally be the best in the world and you'll have clients that'll be like, nah, this isn't right, or I'm not happy with X, Y, Z. But all the while nobody else is finding out about it. And this is a hard thing for a lot of us to be able to toot our own horns. But buddy, if you're not gonna toot it, who's gonna toot it? We gotta get over this like virtue signaling thing where we're like all self deprecating. Like that is all healthy. But also at the end of the day, how many hours did you work last year? And if you've been put on this earth to do this and you won't advocate for yourself, then what are we doing here? Woohoo. If you can't, then let's Instead, find something to spend those 2,500 hours doing that you can't advocate for because life is too precious to be like letting years burn by but be all bashful about, like, ah, you know, you know, I'm an accountant, not a big deal. Like, let's be proud of what we do. Like, let's be advocates for what we do. You doing tax work right now, you got a lot of 1040s you're trying to get out the door, buddy. Have I got the app for you. Is this episode's sponsor, Soroban. 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 that you can feel good about putting in front of your clients. That will save you a tremendous amount of time and, and 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 a hundred plus firms now that are very, very happy users. To learn more about Sorband, check out the link down in the show notes. Can we talk about a very real problem with most offshore staffing solutions? I actually faced this one myself is the, 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 group. 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 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. 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 Teamup down in the link in the show notes. So everything that we're talking about here, from serving a more specific size of clients to doing more specific work within these engagements, all of that is a product of distribution. Distribution is the ultimate lever. It is something that makes most accountants very, very uncomfortable because you're like, I don't want to get up in front of people. But at the same time, most of those same accountants will tell you what I really love is like helping the client out and finding this great outcome. Xyz, which by the way is the best type of marketing. Like the favorite videos that I've put on the YouTube channel are the ones where we're talking about real accounting firms, like coaching them, walking them through actual situations. And then I hear back from those people and they're like, dang, that was super helpful, thank you so much. Like I take so much satisfaction out of that. And it's great content. Like it's stuff that people really enjoy engaging with. And so all we gotta do is find the stuff that we love that doesn't feel like work and find the version of that that we don't have to do behind a paywall, that we don't have to do in private one on one with clients. That is how people discover us. And it's just an incredible thing to experience, to be visible to the world and have people like just be able to stumble into your network just because you are now out there rather than behind a desk. Like the world is so, so big and there's so many people out there that we can help. Where most people are generalists, out of necessity, we can build an even better business by taking, taking the thing that we love doing, be it coaching people Having conversations about the industry, whatever that is, and just doing it in a public setting out in the world instead of in one on one, like behind closed doors sort of engagements. Right. And this doesn't have to be like very visible stuff like a podcast or anything like that. Like if you're okay with that, great, go out and do that. But what people have a huge amount of hunger for now is just like high quality in person stuff, like high value conversations. Whether you can find your way into those rooms, whether you can create those rooms yourself. Like, it's just so powerful to like, a lot of the people that come into my community, they're like, I run an accounting firm and I've never met another accounting firm owner. And they come into this community of 700 other accounting firm owners and they're like, that changes your life like overnight. Like, of course it does. How could it not? I'm not a small talk person. I suspect you probably aren't either if you're an accountant. But if you get sat next to somebody that does exactly what you do and you're like, yeah, no, we use Taxdome. They're like, oh, we use Taxdome. And you're like, yeah, no, we started trying to sell CFO stuff. And I go, we try to sell CFO stuff. You're like, did we just become best friends? Like, it doesn't take much when you're just there and you're part of the conversation with other people who are into what you're into for you to like make really powerful connections and those folks start referring people to you, maybe they become clients. We just got to find our way into those rooms and like into having those conversations. The best places to look is always to think about who are the hubs, the connectors within a space that you want to be in. Who are the consultants, who are the membership bodies, the influencers, who's putting on the events, like just, just show up and, and the very best possible thing you can find here is something that you love, like something that you're passionate about to begin with. And so going and spending time and having those conversations, it's is actually something that you enjoy. Like imagine that being the solution to what ails the accounting firm is going out and meeting cool people and having cool conversations about the stuff that you're passionate about. Imagine that being the solution rather than like working more 12 hour days, right? Because so often, like one more 12 hour day, it can feel like progress when in reality that can be the easy thing to do is to run headlong into that same wall again, because it's what we've been doing for the last 10 years. And we put up these very impressive vanity metrics about how hard we worked to trick ourselves into thinking that we're doing our best. When in reality, the harder thing to do is to stop what we're doing and be like, hey, should we actually rethink this? Maybe have some hard conversations with clients, with staff, and fix some of the underlying issues here to just get to, like, a more calm, more sustainable version of this thing that we're doing? I want it for you. I think you can do it. And I want people to see what a special, special snowflake you are. Okay, time to get out from behind that desk. Hey, speaking of someone that got out from behind a desk, we've got a very real bookkeeping firm that submitted a bunch of information to me anonymously that's found themselves in a very cool niche. But the firm's running into a few problems. I want you and I to put our coaching hat on and talk about how we can help this firm. Roast a firm. Roast a firm. Let's roast a firm. Come on. Chasing a firm. If you want to potentially have your firm anonymously roasted, coached, it's all very positive stuff. Roasting might be too intimidating of a framing, but if you want the chance of your firm being coached as well, check out the link in the show notes. Little intake form may take you 10 or 15 minutes to complete. That's exactly what this person did. By the way, a whole bunch of you have been submitting stuff on this form. Thank you very much for doing so, because I love digging into true stories of people running firms and where they're at. And when we can all hear this and we all get to put our coaching hats on and like, look at somebody else's firm and be like, they should do that. It makes us better at how we think about doing accounting firm things. Okay, let me tell you about this firm. So they do bookkeeping. They also do CRM donor intake for many of their clients. They work with Jewish nonprofits. They help them track programming income and expenses so they know how to budget for the different programs, what they need to fundraise for, along with basic financial statement stuff. So this looks like collecting receipts, classifying, like, purchases back to specific programs and being able to give it back to them in a format that they can kind of understand and consume and make decisions based on. They're also helping them with pretty much anything accounting, payroll related. This submitter, they are the owner of the firm. And this year they will bring in around a quarter million in gross revenue. The firm operates in like just outside of a big city, but their clients are from all over the country, Mostly small rural folk. Most of these organizations don't need a 990 as in they don't need a nonprofit tax filing as they're considered a church. However, the bookkeeping itself is fairly complex because all this stuff has to be tied back to specific programs for budgeting and fundraising purposes. They said their very best client right now is their biggest client. They said they work 40 hours a week for them. I don't know what that actually means. That just means they're like constantly doing stuff for them, doing their books, paying their bills. Pretty good sized organization with a budget of over 3 million a year. They said their second best client are small clients who don't end up having to meet with the owner monthly. And they don't track their programming income and expenses. They just do basic standard bookkeeping work. Those are kind of the two opposite ends of the spectrum, right? The big one that needs lots of help and the second best is the itty bitty one that doesn't need any help specifically from the business owner. Foreshadowing alert. We're gonna make some decisions here on do we want more of the small ones or more of the big ones? Right now, the team makeup, they have four junior bookkeepers which are sort of in charge of managing the clients. One is part time, the other three are full time. They also have two part time senior bookkeepers who oversee the those four junior bookkeepers. So there are six people in the mix here. Three of them are part time, three of them are full time. Top line revenue you saw was a quarter million. So that's quite a few people to squeeze into a quarter million of revenue. They say they appreciate having the senior folks in there to oversee the juniors because they just don't have the time or brain space to make sure that things are actually running properly and being done correctly. It said. Then there is me, the owner, who ends up cleaning up messes and is also meeting with the clients monthly and handling the questions that are too advanced for the bookkeeping team. Other oh, they work part time. Okay. So the owner is not, I don't know, I guess 100% of their time isn't in this. Pricing wise. They've got accounts starting at 300 bucks a month, all the way up to 3200 bucks a month. That is a bit outside the 3 to 1 ratio. Most clients fall between 600 and 1000amonth. They get their clients mainly from word of mouth. No real sales or marketing campaigns. There are WhatsApp groups and fundraising groups that know about them and put our name out there from time to time. I tried to go to their website. It does not exist. It is one of those, hey, here's your email domain. Go to the website. Oh, no website lives here. I'm not even gonna get into their tech cause I think their tech is fine. We've already got enough stuff to cover here. Let me just touch on the pains that they listed. They said they have too many employees and not enough clients. I think we could probably see that in the numbers. You got six people that you're having to manage, especially if you're only working this part time with only a quarter million in top line revenue. They said they're having a hard time raising prices right now. When they have folks come in. As soon as they say their lowest package is 450 bucks a month, a lot of those folks turn away. Sometimes I think that my niche is not a great niche to work in. But this is what I know. I feel like they just don't know the value of having good bookkeeping. They're mission oriented and that's all they're focused on. They said, I feel like I'm working so hard but I'm not making enough money and we're at capacity. So what do you do next? That's tough man. I will call out what they say they enjoy. So they love when all the numbers come together and they have enough information so that the clock client can actually use those numbers to fundraise and to budget and have an understanding of what they should do next. Okay, so what they love in some context is sitting across from the client and coaching them. On the other hand, some of their favorite clients are the itty bitty ones where they don't have to do that month over month. I think the problem here is a volume thing is you love sitting down and having these conversations with clients. The rub is right now you're at capacity, not making much money and so you're like, well this isn't very fun anymore. That's relatable. Pretty much every accounting firm that I've ever met gets to a point where you just keep saying yes and saying yes because there was a day when you had to say yes, but then you sort of filled the client list and that wiring in your brain sort of never changed. Like we are still operating in this sort of scarcity mindset. Where we're like, ah, yeah, no. Well, someday they're like, it might all stop. And so I got to keep saying yes to all this stuff. But there comes a point where we gotta sort of hit pause and be like, who are we willing to help now? Because where the answer before was doing more, now the answer has to switch to doing better. Because I don't have enough bodies in the room, I don't have enough hours in the day to like keep growing. What we're doing right here, that's exactly what this person is facing. They're sitting, they're working six folks right now, three full time, three part time. And they're like, I'm not making enough money for this to be worth my while. But at the same time, what they love is sitting across from these clients and like actually being able to help them. I would argue most of us would happily chop our client list down in half and be able to go deeper with people like that. I mean, that's the most common thing that I see in these submissions is what do you enjoy? For most people it's the sitting down with the clients, it's the helping them, it's seeing their business evolve. We all love that. Yet we end up in a place where we're running such a volume model that, that anytime a client needs to have a conversation, it's a nuisance, right? That is a signal that we are going too shallow with too many people. And something that can force you to go here is exactly what this person said. I meet with new clients, I say it's gonna be 450 bucks a month and they all leave. We see that signal and we're like, dang, does that mean I need to go like even cheaper? And you end up in this volume business? What is the first advice that you would give them? I suspect what a lot of us are going to say is let's think about distribution because you don't even have a website right now and the only way that you get work is word of mouth and some WhatsApp groups. But the world is even in, even in a niche, even in a niche like this, that can feel small and tight knit. The world is so much bigger and so surely when we don't even have a website, we're not tapping into distribution as well as we can. And so if folks are coming and seeing $450, I would say you've maxed out your reach, but you have not maxed out the market. We are a long, long ways from that. Specifically on the $450 thing. I would say the opportunity there, if you're seeing that a lot from clients, is that probably is a framing issue on the website itself. Like we were talking earlier about just having client examples on your website. You said right now most of your clients came in, I think it was between 800 and $1,000 a month if that's what we want more of. Between 600 and $1,000 a month if that's what we want more of. Those are the examples we need to put on the website. Some people would tell you, we'll put your $450 minimum on the website. Then you don't waste your time with those phone calls. I don't think you want $450 people. I think you want like thousand dollar a month people. And having that on your website has a way of manifesting the people that then identify with that. Right now it's clear you have no con. You don't even have a website. So like, there's no context for people to anchor to. Folks want to come and look at something and be like, oh, this is a home for me. There's other people here like me. Finally I found the solution provider for me. And a funny thing happens because you alluded to these folks are so mission or like mission driven. They're not focused on bookkeeping and the value of the bookkeeping. They may not be, but if they can see that other people like them have gone this way, they will get in line. They'll be like, oh, there's obviously something here that I'm missing because there are other people who are just like me and this is how they're solving that problem. So maybe I don't have a complete understanding of the problem yet again, another example of the value of testimonials, of showing examples. So my first bit of advice to you here is the great news is this is the worst it's ever gonna be. Right now we have no website, we have no reach, we're not showing up. And so if we can invest just the littlest bit in distribution and this is not hiring and marketing agency. Like this is not doing some cringe version of marketing that you're not comfortable with. This is just going out in the world like these communities. I am sure there are conferences, meetups, there's so many in person places, especially with the Jewish community having more like geographic concentrations. That is a great thing that most people won't have with their niche when they're working with, you know, vet clinics that are all over the country. To me, it seems like there's an opportunity here to be showing up in person and just like being helpful, like showing up and trying to make connections for other people. Right now it's clear that distribution is obviously not strong. And so it's not gonna take a ton of effort to really change the types of folks that you have access to. You said your biggest client is a organization with a budget of 3 million bucks a year. There are thousands more people like that out there. Maybe not thousands. There are a lot more organizations out there like that. If those are the folks you want to have on your client list, if the most fun version of this business is 10 of those clients, and it might be, then let's figure out where they're hanging out and show up in those spaces and you'll be surprised how quickly you can attract more folks just like them. 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 time. Same, 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. 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Before we get too far into busy season to learn more about Bardo 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 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. Second thought I had here is an important consideration for them. A lot of folks hit this point where they're not sure if they want to do the work or not. You could hear it when they said, well here's my favorite type of client. Here's my second favorite type of client. Favorite is the big one and I enjoy meeting with them and talking every month. My second favorite is all the little ones where I don't even have to talk to them. You can build your business either way. And oftentimes like like we talked about, if you enjoy talking with those clients, doing too much of it will take the fun out of it, right? Like if you're over capacity, everything's burning down. It's very hard to show up on a client meeting engaged being helpful as opposed to if your client list was a tenth the size and you had one of these client meetings a week, wouldn't that be nice, right? Like that sounds pretty cool. These are probably folks at that point that you enjoy hanging with as well. And so you kind of look forward to. You can run this business either way if you go the other direction. If you don't want to be taking these meetings anymore, you just got to recognize that the right client for my business is the one that the business can serve, not the one that I can serve. And those are two very different things I've shared before. I had started building, like, a software agency practice in my accounting firm because I have a software background and I loved working with these people. It was actually really fun. They're super profitable businesses, and so I could vibe with the owners of these agencies, and it was really fun. And I brought a few in that were very profitable. But very quickly, when those folks went to work with my team, they're like, yeah, can we go back and talk to Jason? Because my team didn't have any of that context or any of that expertise. So, like, if I were to go out and build a firm around myself with a very small team, that would be fun. But that wasn't where I was at at that point. I was pretty much totally out of client work. And so those software agencies, even though they were very profitable, they were not the right client for my firm because the team I had at that point in time was not capable of serving them. Now, the team I have at that point in time, that can change of course, right? Like, maybe that's a signal where it's like, no, you should actually go out and like, speak at conferences for these people and just kind of be the hobnobber and go out and hang out, hire a couple people that can speak the language or take some of your team out to these conferences, upskill them with that additional context. For sure, we could have gone down those paths. At that point, I was almost completely out of client work. And so I'm like, let's just go after a different client that my, my staff can serve from day one. In this case, working with Jewish nonprofits. You just got to find the cross section of that that your team is comfortable serving. What's the Venn diagram of their capabilities and the part of the market where they can adequately serve those folks. But also know that, like, that's a moving target as well, right? Like, you could pull in more talent. You could invest in the talent that you already have, but the right client for your team is almost certainly not the right client for you. Those are two different things. Honestly, kind of got to pick one. Am I going to keep meeting with all these people every month, or am I going to try to bring in more clients that my team can handle without me? Third tip here, and this is such a common mistake that we make, and they're now feeling the crush of it since they're over capacity is, we don't just need to scope the work, we need to scope your availability, access to you right now it sounds like every single client has access to you. And this is where things starts to break because, like, the business runs on you being able to give attention to the different things in the business that need attention. Most accounting firm owners like where they hit their breaking point is my clients are texting me, my clients are calling me, they're emailing me. I'm not getting back to them fast enough. We've scoped the work, but we haven't scoped you. Your availability, the service delivery, which is equal if not more important than the work itself, which I know really grinds our gears because we want it to be about the work itself. The trouble is the client doesn't understand the work. They don't understand the technical stuff. So they will make buying decisions based on the service delivery, which just drives you nuts. Don't you want them to buy the most technically capable service offering? Like, if you are a purist and you pride yourself on how well you do the work, that'll. That'll drive you nuts. The fact that they will leave because you don't call them back fast enough, but that needs to be scoped into these agreements, exactly how available you are. Can they talk to you? Do they have to talk to the team? Do they have your cell phone number? They have to come in via email. Can they call you? Do they have to book via, you know, like a scheduling link? You can take control of that so that you know exactly what your availability would be like. You have, if you build that into your agreements, you can take back control of that. Last is to think about the breadth of people that we're serving right now. So they talked about what was the revenue range of people they're serving. Everything from $300 a month all the way up to $3200 a month. So pretty much a 10x swing. Those are very different engagements. Obviously what I'd recommend is just work out like the different bands here of the level of support these organizations require. Every, pretty much every accounting firm. The folks that you're working with at the bottom is like a DIY band. The person that's not ready for professional help yet, where we can develop some resources to help them DIY it more intelligently. Some firms above that can have like a done with you version where like you give them a little bit of support, but you're not really taking the lead on everything. Some firms, that's worthwhile. Other firms, it's not for you. That could also look like a band where you're gonna send that to a Referral partner. So if you're trying to go up market a little bit, the easiest way to give yourself permission to do so is to have another firm who will take all of this stuff that you have right now that you don't want and the future down market people that come in the door, you're like, I can just send them out to this firm. You can do that for free. You could work out a referral arrangement where you get paid for those. But the best thing for your business is not to take those down market clients. And so if, if your firm is going the direction of you said your favorite client, the biggest client here, then I think we probably need to chop off like the bottom half of this client list wouldn't do it all at once, obviously. But find another group that I can refer these smaller projects off to and our identity can be staked in handling the more premium end of the spectrum. So think about the bands here of different client identities from the really small DIY. Like the folks that scoff at $450 a month, is there a resource you could build to be helpful to them still? And then the folks that are maybe 450 to, you know, 1500amonth, what do they need? Is there another firm that you can send those folks to? And then if you're going to set up camp and say the 1500 to 3500 range, then how do we get our messaging out there and put examples like that on the website so the folks know that this, this is where you are set up and you're the firm for them if that's them, like if they are in that band. Every firm has a version of this sort of like, well, what's the right solution for this band versus that band? What a lot of us will just do is like, well, we're in this range. If you're not in this range, I don't care. The problem is if we do that, we miss out on the opportunity of like making connections in the industry and folks finding you if they're not ready for you yet, but then eventually in the future become ready for you. Oftentimes that's a justification for taking on clients that are too small. Whereas instead, I think it's just worth having a clear answer for. If they're here, here's where we send them. If they're here, here's where we send them. But if they're in this range, they're great for us. And it even lets you get your fingers a little bit into like these people that are Leaving that like scoff at 450amonth because oftentimes those people, in 12 months time they'll be ready to circle back and be like, okay, I actually better understand the value of what you do now. And now I'm happy to pay. Good for you making this submission. Hopefully you got something helpful out of this and we have all learned just by talking through it. If you've got relatable advice, drop it down in the YouTube comments and check out the link in the show notes for a chance to have your firm coached as well. But we gotta keep moving. We got mail to get through. Mailbag, Mailbag. Mailbag. Mailbag. This segment is called Mailbag. These questions are sourced from from email, from social DMs, from YouTube comments, from my phone. You got a question, text me or leave me a voicemail at 1-516-980-4968. Hey Jason, I acquired a book of business earlier this year for tax season. I'm wanting to collect their banking info and then we can just bill it when we're done. The client base isn't used to this. I'm hoping it doesn't result in more more client attributes. Should I work to earn the acquired clients trust first or just go ahead and try to collect their banking info when I send out engagement letters? Thank you. Double exclamation mark. So just got a new book of business. Anytime you come into an accounting firm, like owning a firm, you're always afraid of how many clients are gonna leave as you should be and so you're a little afraid of rocking the boat. I can tell you my experience with making people provide a payment method upfront for the first time is I was really, really spooked about it. And in the end it was kind of no big deal for people. I blew it up to be a bigger thing than I thought it would. There will be some people who complain, but those are not usually the people that you're going to be excited about helping. And so if anything, this is potentially a useful signal for clients to self select into being a pain in your hiney and it may actually make your life easier if they self select out at this stage. A little bit of a factor here is in the buyout, is there a client? Like if a client leaves, do you still have to pay for that client or did you pay upfront so that what you paid is what you paid regardless of whether these clients leave? Another consideration here is am I buying a tax book but also adding bookkeeping work? Like is there an arbitrage thing here, where it's going to be very easy to cash flow, you know, 25% of the client base. If that's the case, then the whole transaction, in my mind, is much less risky. So I'm less worried about alienating people, and I'm more willing to come in and say, here is my process. Whether you like it or not, not up to you. Whether you take it or leave it. If you do this for the first time, best suggestion I can give you is give them a price upfront. They will appreciate that. And the hardest thing here will be logistically getting those people to go out to a platform and add their payment method and actually follow through on that. The best way I found to incentivize that is to send out a message and say, hey, we're giving you a price up front, but you got to go get it from this platform. That's what I did. We did this over, like 1800 projects the first year and ended up with almost 60% success rate and getting payment methods, which I actually think is a very big success. And what was a hugely diverse client base, a lot of old folks, like all the types of people that you think may give you pushback. So I would push you to try to get them to provide that payment method upfront, but think about what the incentives are to them to do so. The best one I found was giving them a price upfront. Thanks for the question. Next one. I have a handful of legacy clients, and I genuinely love them. I'm deeply loyal, and I. And I've always told them I'd be there. Oof. How do you let go of people who believed in you from the very beginning? I wouldn't be where I'm at today without them. The concept makes sense, but the execution can feel heartless. I think. I think you know what you need to do. So maybe you're looking for advice on the executioner. I mean, I think you got to solve what's happening between the ears. Here was my experience is I had a version of this too, where I had a lot of folks that, like, believed in me and all that. And I feel like. And this may be one of those unlearnable lessons where, like, you just don't believe it until you've gone through it. But I can tell you what my experience was selling my accounting firm was I had all these people that had come to work for me, all these clients that I'd brought in because I was doing most of the sales in the firm. And I'm like, These people need me, man. Like, I am. I am the guy for them. Like, they have a. You know, the employees have sort of staked their livelihood and their belief that I can run this business. Their clients have come to us. We've unlocked all these really cool things for our clients. They need us. They need me. And what I learned when I sold the firm was fewer of those connections remained than I thought would. And you could hear that and be like, oh, turns out Jason's just a real. I think what that, like, you may have experienced versions of this too. And I remember talking about this with my wife early in our marriage. When we moved, it was like she was in a job and she had a couple of really close friends at that job and then went to a different job. And then it's like, these people don't want to hang out with me anymore. And it was like you were friends and connected as a product of your life and your job and all of that stuff. And what I learned after selling the firm was that for most of these people, I was a means to an end. I was the signature on their paycheck. I was the person that filed their tax return. I was the one that handled their sort of accounting department behind the scenes for them. That doesn't mean that I didn't have real relationships with those people. What it did mean was that supporting those people to the ends of the earth couldn't be prioritized over my own well being and that of my family. Because we all know what it looks like to go to work and put the cape on for everybody there and then roll up at home at 11pm Kids are sawing logs, and then you're off to work in the morning before they even get out of bed. So in that whole transaction, I had very few relationships that were maintained from the firm to still after the firm and to today. But the people that did remain were my family. And they are the people that are most impacted by the business decisions that I make. You know, the cost of continuing to serve your earliest clients indefinitely, you will pay the price for that. That's a lot. And so sometimes we have to put this stuff in perspective. To say these people, they did believe in you from the early days. But if you can't make this hard decision now, know that you will. You will never be able to. Because the version of this where you're struggling with the clients that very first, like, came to you, say you're able to let those people go. You know what, in 24 months, you're going to be faced with the exact same thing again. Welcome to entrepreneurship. This game never ends. Like, growth is always moving, too. Like, here's a more premium set of problems that I can solve. And, like, this is the next version of my business that I'm excited about. For most of us, we're not excited about running the exact same business for decades on end, but you don't get to that next thing until you are willing to. To move on from what got you there. And, like, regardless of whether you run a firm or wherever you're at in your career, the only thing that matters is what you do next. And I think it's most healthy if we think about all of the things that got us to where we are right now, simply preparing us for what's next. It doesn't mean that we have to keep doing what we've always done, because the person that you are today is the only person that's capable of. Of that next really exciting thing that might mean a change in the makeup of your client list. For me, it meant selling my firm back to my partner and making stupid Internet videos. But we can't be so vested in serving the people who want us to be who we used to be that we can't then grow into the person that we want to become. That's what I'm hearing here. You've got something you want to go and do next, and you're realizing, I gotta cut bait with some of these people who believed in me, but recognize they're not getting your best if you're no longer that person. And we're fooling ourselves if we think they are. So the best thing that we can do is make them the first clients that put food on the table of somebody else, because there was a stage when you really needed those clients. And right now, there's somebody listening to this podcast who's in that same stage. And the longer you hang on to those clients, the longer it keeps them from being someone else's great clients. These people are not the apple of your eye anymore. They might be great people, but they're not what you need to get to what's next for you. I think this gets easier as we are more mature in how we run our business and have done it for a longer period of time. That separation between the relationship you have with the person and the relationship that your business has with their business, those are two different things that, especially when we're starting out, are very muddled. And there's this expectation that if you fire them, you're Firing the person, it's like, no, my business is going here, your business is going here. No longer makes sense. But I still appreciate you. I may or may not still want to maintain that relationship. Those are two very different things. And at least over time, I got better at communicating what we did and what my firm did in a way that was separate from how I communicate with that person. And it was actually more fun because, like, I could just, like, vibe with that person and hang out and ask them about their life, and we could build a real relationship that was separate from like, hey, here's the contract for the next 12 months. Here's what my team's going to do for you with where your business is at. And then when it came to part ways, like, it's a business thing, it's not a personal thing. And that just ended up being a much healthier balance because, like, when it is too intertwined, you end up carrying all these things for all of these people, and that's exhausting. So know that you can do it, and you are never going to regret making the hard decisions that enabled you to get to what was next for you. I mean, speaking from my own experience, I was running my firm. It was a really hard time at the firm. I had at the time, three kids who were three and under. Yeah, that. That wasn't the plan. There was some sort of fundamental. Understand. There was some sort of fundamental misunderstanding of how the birth control was supposed to work. We never got to the bottom of it. But three kids under three, not under three. Three kids, three and under. And I'm like, this firm is demanding a lot from me right now. And I got these little rugrats running around at home. And I've got this interesting opportunity where it might actually become a business for me to go out and help a bunch of firms. That gives me a little more flexibility. Now I get to shoot this podcast in my house with those same children screaming just on the other side of the door behind me. And at the time, I thought that was better. It's probably still better. Okay, next question. Until I get them all in school and then I go out and start a. Start an accounting firm or roll up some accounting firms. Right. My firm is preparing about 20 tax returns per year and growing. Good for you. Love what you did on your website by asking. Prompting questions about a firm and then analyzing practice management tools and recommending which ones are best for smaller firms. So we've got a tool on my website. Basically, you walk through a little few questions and it recommends the best practice management system for you. They said, can you do the same for AI tax software tools, depending on firm size? I've done some research and realized that most out there won't take firms our size unless there's at least 50 tax returns. Did we get some version of this question? Already having deja vu. Tell me if I'm wrong here. As far as tax intake tools go, all right, Tax prep software, like the software that you put the numbers into to create the tax forms, they all suck. Just go to my app recommendations jasononfirms.com apps and find the least sucky one for you. What I think they're talking about is AI tax intake software. As far as I know, the only among my leaders who are Sorband, Stanford Tax and Trusts, as far as I know, the only one here with a minimum is, I think Sorben requires a contract of 210 forties a year or something like that, which is a bummer because, like, it makes it hard to test out that tool before you do it. Right. The flip side of this, to take the software vendors, uh, argument, and this is very common. I mean, Live Flow dealed with a version of this. I know, and, and so they ended up with like a $500 minimum at one point. But put yourself in the software vendor shoes where you have like, someone will come along with like five tax returns and be like, can you show me how to use the entire platform? And you spend like a half a day with these people and they get paid, what is it, $20 per tax return per year? And so that that firm is worth $100 too. Like, how much time can you really invest in that? Now that puts the tiny firms in a really tough spot. Firms exactly like this, where they're only bringing 20 tax returns to the table and it's like, well, who's going to invest the time in getting us set up and all that? That's just a really hard thing. Honestly, it's tricky. But to answer the question more directly to my knowledge, and please correct me in the comments if I'm wrong, I believe Sorban is the only one that has a minimum threshold. Right. 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 email 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 a hundred 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, 20 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. Next up, you mentioned buying a book of business. I listened to your side Hustle episode, got an episode of the podcast. It's kind of a complete guide for building a side hustle accounting firm. That is where most people start if they want to build their own firm. They said they listened to the side Hustle episode, but they're not sure how to do it. Do they cold call? Do they reach out through a network? Do accountants advertise that they have business to give away? So many silly questions. Sorry, not a silly question. So how do you find those first clients? If you have any connections with accounting firms, that's a great place to start. This is way easier if you're in a niche. So if you want to work with taxidermists, go to ChatGPT. Find every, every tax firm, every bookkeeping firm that just works with taxidermists. Try to get in front of these people and meet them. Say, hey, I'm a bookkeeper. I'm a tax pro. I'm a, I'm a financial advisor. I'm an attorney, whatever it is, that only works with taxidermists that will get you through much. It's much more likely likely to get you through than just normal cold emails and dms because we all get so many of those, we don't know what to believe. It's hard to get anybody to respond honestly because of all that cold outreach. But I can tell you there's a humongous appetite for accounting firms to be able to send work to other trusted accounting firms. Like, you know this. If you have clients, you would love to move along. Wouldn't it be nice if you had a great relationship with another firm that you could trust with these clients? It would make it way easier to let those clients go. So we all want it, but how do you break through that barrier when you don't know each other? Comes back to distribution. Do people know that you exist? Are you showing up at events that other accountants will be at and just making connections? That's the best thing that you can do. And human in person stuff breaks through that noise better than anything else. Cold calling accounting firms almost never going to work. For most accounting firms, you're probably. You're either going to need to write a really good email or DM or get in front of them in person to kind of break through that ickiness. Showing up or sending food to accounting firms that you are near that are like, in your geographic region if you're just trying to get started. In fact, I think it was last week on the podcast we talked about a bookkeeping firm where their primary referral source, or maybe this was on the YouTube channel, was local CPA firms sending their bookkeeping to this bookkeeping practice. Still the best way to break through to traditional accounting firms, and this is. Accounting firms that have a physical office set up is food like the gift baskets. Come on, don't act like you're above this. Somebody sends you a basket of food and you're like, well, okay, I'll listen. And you got some sort of note in there that's like, hey, there's more where this came from if we chat about, you know, just trying to drum up some local bookkeeping work. So think about what your surface area is right now for making those connections and how to. How to maximize that surface area. I wanted to take on this fight from Twitter. So somebody had said plumbers charged $99 just to come out and take a look at your problem and apply it and apply that $99 to the service if you end up going with them. But you pay the 99 bucks no matter what. This is an acceptable practice in their field and seems reasonable for both sides. Why isn't this mandatory for tax prep consults? I'm starting to feel like this should be the standard. And then Logan Graff hopped in and retweeted it and said, accountants love to give away free information because they're scared to say no. Which is just patently wrong. Logan, he does the same thing I did. In fact, I think he stole this from me. If you're doing a consult with a client, get em to pay for it. And if you want, you could optionally apply that to actual work if they became a client. Most of the time. If you think about who your great clients are, the differentiator, like those great clients, they would not have not got on the bus had you charged them an upfront fee for a consult. The folks that usually don't get on a bus because you got that consult there, they were not the people that would have been great clients to begin with. But to the point of the original poster and the example of plumbers, like, yes, this absolutely can be the norm. You almost think about your onboarding process as something that can weed out the folks that you later learn you really don't want to work with. The example of the firm, we were just talking with the folks that come along and they say 450 bucks a month is too much. If you don't want $450 a month clients, then you really want something to weed them out before they get to you. And so there's a lot of ways that we can do this. I wouldn't say like a paywall is the best way. The better thing to do here is like being very selective in your website and who you say that you work with. If all of your client examples are like, oh, this one's $1,800 a month, this one's $2,600 a month. The person that is going to insist on $90 a month bookkeeping, like, they're just not going to call you. So the best version of this happens before they even pick up the phone or book a call. But I think there's nothing wrong with charging to get on a call. At the very least, it avoids the time wasting phone calls. Like if, let's say software vendors just wanted to be able to get on a call with me. If I said yes, I do that, by the way, I don't do this with anybody. But if I said yes, I will do this, but you gotta pay 200 bucks. 80% of those people will go away. Because, yeah, the low value folks that like are, you know, it may have even been automated outreach. All those folks go away. And so like, that's totally fine in my mind to protect your time. Two questions to go. Why don't you think Taxdome can support a team more than 20? I may go over that count next year and I want to be prepared. So I said this at one point, that really Canopy Carbon and Count are more of the practice management systems for bigger firms. And honestly, that is a product of all of the big firms that I know. That's what they use. And there's not that many big firms that I know. Like, I don't know everybody's definition of big firms is different, but I don't know many firms over 20 who are using Taxdome. That being said, the right answer for you. If you're on Taxdome right now, by no means, like, don't kick it to the curb once you get over 20. Kick it to the curb if you're like, oh, this hasn't grown to support what I need. Like, if you feel like you are bursting at the seams with the tool that you use, go out and learn about the bigger market tools. Cause they will have very real drawbacks too. Like, small firm tools can do things that big firm tools cannot. But no need to jump ship. Like, until you get to the point where you're like, okay, I very obviously need this or that. Now, as firms get bigger, usually that's around like more complex reporting needs and, and all that. But no one app can, can serve every single size of firm. Great. Like it's just in terms of the density and the volume of things that have to show up on screen. Like, there is no way to do that really well. So software vendors will tell you that they think they can. I will tell you what I see people having success with and that is what leads our recommendations. But if you're like, if you're very happy on Taxdome, when you're about to blow past 20 people and you see no potential issues in the near future with going to 30 or 40 people, then keep going. I got no problems with that. Last question. For a bookkeeping firm literally just starting out, they have one client. I'm finding it hard to tailor the website to a specific type of client to give it a niche feel. Do you have ideas on how to present yourself when you're really just starting out and you don't have an ideal niche yet? Those examples that you put on your Website. They do not have to be real examples. Don't present them as if they are real examples. Like don't lie about it, but say, hey, who's. Here's who we are. Great for. It does add proof. If you put a real company name there, like maybe then you can't say the exact fee. You could say a fee range. But the more we compare this with testimonials and stories of real brands, especially, especially if other people recognize those brands, that goes a long ways. But just being able to tell a story of like, here's who we're great for, the type of stuff we'll do for them and the ballpark cost, that is infinitely better than putting minimums or putting nothing on your website. Hopefully you know enough about those folks to be able to tell a pretty realistic story that like solves a meaningful problem. And so the next person that comes along with that same problem, they're like, oh geez, okay, this is the firm for me. Hopefully you know the space well enough to be able to do that. But by no means like having the clients that you've already done that with or can be the exact example. That is not a prerequisite to saying on your website who we want to work with. There's some people in the profession that will like pull the ladder up behind them and be like, you have no business of serving these people unless you have XYZ experience. But oftentimes those are the same people who are generalists where they will get one vet client and the client comes in, they're like, do you work with any other vets? And they're like, no, I don't think so. But it's all the same. We can figure it out. Those people who will do one client, you know, a hundred different times, are they experts in serving vet clients? Are they really qualified to say it's all the same when that's the first vet client they've ever had? And then you consider the other person who's out on their own and they're like, I want to build a vet niche even though I don't have any vets yet. My brother in law's a vet and I've learned a lot and that looks interesting. And having a, a passion for animals. I would argue that person is actually more qualified because it comes from a place of personal interest and passion and all that. And then very quickly they develop real expertise because that's the only type of client that they're serving. But it can be easy to convince yourself, well, I have no Business serving those clients because I don't have any of them yet. Like the experience, like the doing of the thing is the prerequisite to having the experience. So for sure, be careful not to get out over our ski tips and hold ourselves out as more of an expert than we are and get in trouble. Something like that. But the person that's passionate about that thing and wants to really focus on that, they will always be more capable in that domain than the generalist who just takes one in and they're like, we'll figure it out. Now there's ways to caveat that, right? Like especially around tax and like salt compliance, like state and local stuff. There are asterisks to that. But if you are passionate about going down a specific path path, don't let the fact that you haven't helped a bunch of those people already stop you. You will very quickly become the expert just by focusing on that domain in a way that many people that tell you you shouldn't do that are not right. That's kind of the secret to adulting is like finding the thing that for you doesn't feel like work because you're passionate about it. You'd be up reading about it at night anyways. That makes you amazing at your job. And if you can find that thing and marry it with the people you serve, oh my gosh, what a fun job. And is it like, are you interest going to evolve over time? Like for sure. Like the people who are like, don't make your hobby your job. I've always thought that's terrible advice. Like to run away from the things in life that you're passionate about. I think in most cases when you run toward that thing, do you find a new thing that you're passionate about or even more nuance in there? Like yes, almost certainly. But that's kind of the fun thing about accounting is everybody needs accountants. And so if you've got a space you're really interested in, you can go do your thing in that space. Enjoy the time you spend doing it and the conversations that you get to have. Speaking of having conversations, thanks for coming here and having this one. It's great to see you looking smart today. Got any questions, any stuff you want to cover, pop it down in the comments, Shoot me an email, shoot me a dm, leave me a voicemail. And gang, we'll be back doing this again. See you there. Okay, till next time.