590 The 7 Things Your DESK Needs: An Accountant’s Guide [The most important workspace decision for accountants]

Today we're talking about what is the most important piece of furniture inside your office, your desk. Importantly, the 7 things that everybody's desk needs to have. This is not a drill. These are important things. Okay. But also today we're going to peek behind the curtains of a $2.1 million a year accounting firm. The owner last year cleared just over $600 grand. Going to talk about how they're doing it, what they're stuck on, and how they can do it even more better. And we're digging into a bunch of your questions. What are the boundaries right now around cloud cowork? What can we use it for and not use it for? The story of someone who's buying an accounting firm off of a listing site. What to do when your clients keep complaining about rates and won't use the software you put in front of them. And responding to some people dunking on me on the internet. This is going to be a fun one, man. We're covering all sorts of ground today. Come on in. Let's get down to it. If you're new here, welcome aboard to the Jason on Firms podcast where we talk all things accounting firm running, whether you own a firm, whether you work in a firm. What this podcast is, is just a fun place to hang out for an hour talking accounting firm stuff. Sometimes it gets sweaty, sometimes it doesn't. I don't know about you. I need to rinse the AI out of my brain right now. So we are talking about desks. Ever so important are desks. Don't sleep on your desk because they have a big impact on the quality of your work experience. The last sort of office setup episode like this that we did was around monitors, quite possibly the most important or highest stakes thing that you spend money on in your, in your physical, like, work environment, your computer monitor. But your desk, it's up there too, for reasons that we're going to get into. Let's jump straight into this. If you're on the video version of the podcast and I look like a weirdo because I have a laptop on one side, yet I'm holding a humongous iPad, it's because OpenClaw is still running my laptop. Great news, though. We shot our OpenClaw video today. Oh gosh, that was a lot of work. But anyways, it's taken over my machine. And so I can't— it's— listen, my IT setup is complex, yet you should still trust me for what I'm about to tell you about desks. Okay. First thing that every desk needs, and this is very important, it is cable access without having to go sub-desk because I don't want you to be that person that is literally on their hands and knees under their desk to find a Lightning cable or a USB-C cable. And then inevitably somebody comes into your office when you're down there And you're like stuck and your butt's just hanging out, flapping in the breeze. And you're like trying to explain from beneath your desk. And they're like, I'll just come back. The best way to do this cable access without creating this mess of a desk, because that's gonna be a theme here today, is just too much going on on your desk. The tidiest way to do this is with cable holders. I don't know if you've ever seen a cable holder, but it's basically just, there's a little rubber thing that sticks to your desk and you like snap the cord onto it and it just hangs onto that cable. These were transformative in my life. In my opinion, the best way to use a cable holder is to stick it to the leading edge of your desk. When I say the leading edge, I say not, not the edge that's up against your tum tum right now, but the edge that is closest to the wall, like the edge that is extended arm's length away from you right now. Put a cable holder on that leading edge and then popped into that cable holder, have every type of cord that you need, be it USB-C, be it a Lightning cable. I honestly, these days, what other cords do you even need? But have that always within reach because having to go rifling through a drawer under your desk just to get a cable, you're better than that. You know, this is going to come up when you need that table, table cable. Have a plan. Okay. That is like a $4 purchase on Amazon. Just search cable holder. There you go. Easy win. On to number 2. Second thing that your desk needs: wheels. The round things. Wheels. 4 of them on all 4 corners. I don't have any data to back this up, but I think A very large percentage of workplace injuries, maybe upwards of 50%, happen when people are trying to move their desk 6 inches or less. And it's because the desk was made at a time before we had wheels, evidently. Like, your desk was not made to scooch around. If you have just the, the Formica behemoths of the '90s, I mean, those— there's literally not a more abrasive surface on the planet than crosscut particleboard. But sometimes the situation presents itself where you got to move that desk just a little bit. And listen, I know that you were real athletic ever so long ago, but I just don't want that body to write a check. But I just don't want your brain to go start writing checks that that body can't cash. And if your desk has wheels on it, it's not a big deal. You got to scooch the desk a little bit. Not a big deal to move it. You got to scooch the desk a lot of bit. I'm actually a huge fan of casters on desks. In my office, we did this a lot. We would literally rearrange desks for like different projects and it was just something that we ended up doing quite a bit. And really, wheels are more about are you willing to chain yourself to this physical location? Like, I'm not. The desk I'm using right now has wheels. It's about optionality. Okay? It's more of a frame of mind. First accounting firm I ever worked at, guy was a total maniac. It was an itty-bitty, itty-bitty firm, like maybe 5 people. We had a client who was a, I think, a 96-year-old man at the time. Real sweet guy. But every year when he came in, he always backed into his parking spot and he was the only car in the lot that backed in. It was kind of a weird shaped lot. It was actually very difficult to back into a spot. And another young guy that I worked with one time summoned up the courage to ask him like, what, why do you always back in like every single year, every time you back into your parking spot, why is that? And the guy simply said, because you never know when you're gonna need to make a quick exit. This was a 96-year-old man, a retiree with a very basic tax return that we did for him every year. And that guy was thinking ahead, as you should be at 96 years old. If you're going to be chained to your desk for the next 2 decades, if you're going to be chained to your desk for decades, at least give the thing you're chained to wheels. Okay, that's number 2. We're 2 upgrades in. We maybe spent $40 at this point. Number 3, your desk needs a companion cabinet for all the crap that has no business being on your desk. Okay, a desk is not a place for collecting things, for holding things. I love your scarf., but it's not the desk's job to hold it. Cables, erasers. This could look like a little rolly cabinet that maybe is like under one side of your desk, but this cabinet has to exist somewhere for the love of keeping the top surface of your desk nice and tidy. Now, a couple things I would suggest that you have in there. These things don't rise to the level of things that are needed for every desk. Let's say they were on the, the honorable mention list. Number 1, something to clean your monitor. Because have you looked at that thing lately? Second, something to blow out your keyboard, you filthy animal. There are— I mean, I would eat a tuna salad sandwich off an airplane seat before I would— I couldn't get through that. But that's probably honestly the truth. I would clean a tuna salad sandwich, eat a tuna salad sandwich off of an airplane seat before I would eat it off of somebody's keyboard. Keyboards are just disgusting. You need some canned air. Put that in your cabinet. Do us all a favor. Blow out that, that keyboard a couple of times a year. You'd be shocked to see what comes out of it. It is the perfect thing to go into that new cabinet of yours. Number 4 thing that every desk needs is the ability to go up and down. We're talking sit-stand, people. And listen, I'm not a, I'm not a big woo, you need to get on your feet every day sort of guy, although you probably should. For me, this is purely an ergonomic thing because not all people were made the same size. Not all chairs were made the same size. Thusly, there is no size desk that is right. And so it is not too much to ask to have a desk that will go up and down, especially now as sit-stand desks have gotten cheaper. Don't go like— I'm not talking going Kirkland like hand crank special. Don't do that. You deserve a little more than that with the number of hours that you're spending in your chair right now. Standing is great. Don't stand all the time, but standing just to change things up is great. By the way, a different type of chair is also great. Maybe an even bigger thing to just like loosen up the back and get you moving a little bit. I'm a big fan of those, those tilty stools. Ooh, that's a sneaky upside of a sit-stand desk is not only the sitting and the standing, but the thing in between, like stool height, the lean height. Don't sleep on that one. But being able to adjust your desk up, up and down, like even just to get to an optimal sitting height, it's very, very helpful. And paired with a monitor arm is the only way without a whole bunch of extra equipment to get your hands at the perfect height and your eyes looking at the perfect height. The little stands on our monitors, as we got into in the monitor episode, the stand on your monitor generally is not going to have enough vertical adjustments to get the monitor as high as you want it to be, which is to say as high as your eyeballs or actually a touch higher is where you want your monitor. But then we shouldn't be adjusting our desk height to set the monitor height because there is a correct height at which your hands should be resting while you're tippy-tapping. And so we only get to those two things being independent if I can adjust the height of my desk as well as the height of my monitor independently. Okay, that is the 4th thing your desk needs. 3 more things. Number 5 thing that your desk needs is a window. This window, I want to be somewhere between 10 o'clock and 2 o'clock in front of you because it's going to make you look real good on video. It will. And so this could impact where your desk is, which direction your desk is facing, but importantly, it's also going to remind you of the outside and give you something to look at that's far away because that's actually a big deal for your peepers. If you're staring at a monitor for a really long time or enclosed inside of a room, very good for your eyes to be able to look at something far away from time to time. And a window is probably the best way to do that because you're not actually going to go outside. So the window, it's, it's the next best thing. Number 6 thing that your desk needs is something green. Just to pretend that we're bringing a little bit of nature into the office. You could do like if you're a snake plant person, great, knock yourself out. Don't be the snake plant person that never trims the snake plant. And then it's like full Jumanji. You've got this big old thing that you've now attached to like 8 different points in the office. Don't be that person, but have a little bit of greenery on the desk, even if it's a fake plant. Again, we're just trying to remind ourselves that there was a time that our ancestors were outside. And who knows, maybe AI will get us back to that. But last one, number 7, 7th thing that your desk needs. So it's going to make a lot of people mad. Your desk needs to only go one direction, a rectangle from one place, a rectangle from one point in space to another. It doesn't need to be an L-shape. It doesn't need a return. It doesn't need a whole wraparound. Ready for a truth bomb? The L-shaped desk is the fourth monitor of desks. You know, I'm right about this. You only use it to pile stuff on that you have no business Having out that fourth monitor. What are you parking up there? Microsoft Outlook, Twitter, like just something that is waiting to distract you. That return on your desk, it's the same thing. You just pile in files there. You put your coat there. Don't just get more desks so you have more room to pile junk on your desk. You're better than that. All right. Now, a lot of us have offices that are like kind of big. And so sometimes we get mega desks just to justify like filling up some more space so the office doesn't look so empty and sparse. But just like more monitor screen real estate just invites more distractions, more desk surface real estate just invites mess. That one might have made more people mad than going after 4-monitor guy or 48-inch monitor guy. Now that's it, right? 7 things that your desk needed. Because everything that matters about your desk is it's right here. It's what you see with your eyes, right? It's what's on top of the desk, right? Wrong. 99% of accountants are only getting 50% realization out of their desk because arguably the most important part of your desk— here it comes— it is your under desk. You hear what I said? Your under desk. What's happening on the underside of your desk right now? Because the surface area of your desk has an entire other surface. Okay, we're headed to the Upside Down. Let me give you 4 things that your under desk needs number 1, your computer. What? He never said computer back in the things that your desk needs. He never said computer back in the section about things your desk needs. That's because your computer should be on your under desk. It should. It should be suspended beneath your desk because your desk, the entirety of it, should be a battle station on wheels that only needs 2 things to persist and contribute to society: a power cable and an Ethernet cable. That's it. Those are the only two things I have coming off my desk. And gang, arguably, like, you can make a strong argument even against those two things so that literally you and your desk, you could roll out, take to the streets, and everything you need is attached to that desk to be productive. This is how I built all my desks in my office. Everything was self-contained. So the first thing that's attached to your under desk, it is your computer. The second thing, it is a cable management solution. Now, easy trap here with cable management solutions. Is you want it to be so tidy that you like wrap every cord around the cable management thing. It's all like tight and bundled and looks pretty. A pretty looking cable bundle is not a cable bundle that will, that will last the test of time because as soon as you need to change one thing, then you're like undoing a cross stitch that you just spent 40 minutes doing. It shouldn't be pretty. What you need down there is just some sort of basket or a pouch just to corral the mess., but the more you try to make it perfect and wrap one thing around another, the harder it then is to change anything down the road. So cable management, keep it simple, doesn't need to be pretty. We got more AI headlines going around than ever before right now, right? Accounting firms are hiring AI agents to do real work, but one company, they said, we know better. They said, we're going to be here for you. When you need a human. You know, remember a human, the original AI agent. And Cloud Accountant Staffing, it's run by folks that used to run an accounting firm and help you find accounting talent all over the world. Now they've got a self-service portal where you can actually go out right now and in 60 seconds or less see all of the candidates that they've got who are looking for roles, even book interviews directly from that portal. They even do human benchmarking. They do assessments with these folks so you can see their personality type and like what percentile they come in on certain accounting skills. They've done all this pre-work for you. So for you, it's as easy as hopping into the portal and booking an interview. These humans come absolutely packed with all sorts of features, all sorts of things your AI agents can't do. Okay, so I know you're hiring a bunch of AI agents right now, but if you need a human— hot, maybe this is a hot take— if you need a human, talk with Cloud Accountant Staffing. To learn more, check out the link down in the show notes. 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 sponsor Soraban. 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 Soraban, you just dump all the docs that your clients are giving you into Soraban. 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 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 Sorban's gonna save you a tremendous amount of time. I know tens, if not 100+ firms now that are very, very happy users. To learn more about Sorband, check out the link down in the show notes. The third thing that needs to be on your under desk is your battery backup. So this is a surge protector, but also battery backup. If you work off a laptop, you at least need a surge protector, battery backup, not a big deal. But I literally have a battery backup attached to the underside of my desk next to the computer attached to the underside of my desk. Again, the only things I want coming off of my, my desk setup is a power cable, and in my case, an Ethernet cable because I need super chunky throughput on all things internet stuff because we work with such big files. The fourth and final thing you need for your under desk: hooks. You wouldn't believe the number of uses there are for hooks. Hanging a purse, hanging your lunch bag, hanging some headphones, putting a banana on there. So many useful things that you can do with hooks. And we've now gone from this behemoth mega desk thing where you are going to slip a disc just trying to move it 3 inches to now a lean, agile, adjustable desk system that gives you everything that you need in one place. But the place itself becomes negotiable. You can roll that sucker out the door, you can roll it out into the backyard. That is a desk setup that was built for the uncertainty, the agility that's required of us in 2026. Okay, this is important. Don't take this lightly. I can tell you 3 things that your desk doesn't need, just to make a few more people mad on the way out here. Power plugs on the surface of your desk. Cool, neat party trick that you have plugs on the top of your desk. But you know what happens as soon as you plug something into that? Your desk looks gross, man. That's just a mess. I don't want a giant plug and cord and all that sticking straight up off the surface of my desk. Do the rest of us blessed with the gift of sight a favor? Keep that stuff in your under desk, man. Nobody wants to see it. Second thing that your desk doesn't need is a curved cutout. Any sort of cutout. If you've ever seen this, there's like a, like on the edge of the desk that you're sat up against, some of them will curve inward, like put the human here. Don't, don't go for these. This is actually really bad ergonomics because the desk is going further away from you there, meaning you're going to end up having to reach further forward to tippy tap on your keyboard, which just makes the whole like shoulders slumping forward issue worse. I used to be really into the desks with this curve cutout because they look kind of cool, but from an ergonomic standpoint, they're not the move. Third thing your desk doesn't need is any sort of drawers or any keyboard trays under the desk. Remember, the desk itself needs to go up and down. The monitor itself needs to be able to go up and down. Set the desk height to the height that your hands need to be when they type and the monitor height to the height of your eyeballs when you're looking straight ahead. With those two things solved for, I don't need a janky little tray, little pullout thing under my desk. After all, we're making full use of our under desk by hanging a computer, the battery backup, our cable management, all that stuff. Don't put that awful little plastic keyboard tray down there. A lot of hot takes. I know you might be spinning after that one. I'm not real opinionated on like what desks are best. I've bought a lot of Fully desks in the past, F-U-L-L-Y. I mean, if you really want to overspend on office stuff, all things Secret Labs are very, very nice. You've probably seen I've got a Secret Labs chair that I've had for a number of years. They have a metal Secret Labs desk. Desk that has like a whole magnetic accessory ecosystem sort of thing. Not cheap, but if you had to go out and buy like one super cool nerd desk, it would probably be the big Secret Labs metal desks. The other sleeper pick is, I think it's Husky in the US, has just like this sort of chunky wood sit-stand desk that might actually be like a manual crank sit-stand desk, which isn't the end of the world and it's still better than stationary. But I'm not hugely opinionated on like what desk is right. Because they've kind of gotten similar and a lot of these sit-stand desk companies are actually all using the same frames underneath. The bigger thing is what does the top of your desk look like? Are we leveraging the near limitless opportunity that comes from our under desk? And have we moved away from the behemoths of the past to lean into a more, more flexible, more agile future? Because you never know when you're going to need to make a quick exit. Tell me what I got wrong. Tell me anything that I'm missing on the desk front. Give me a comment. Happy to fight this one out. But up next, we got to get to this. $2.1 million firm so I can tell you all about how this owner is clearing over $600,000 a year. Roast a firm. Roast a firm. Let's roast a firm on Jason on Firm. Okay, this firm agreed to be anonymously roasted on the podcast, and you can do the same. There's an intake form down in the show notes. Takes about 10 or 15 minutes to complete that form. It gives me some information about your firm. Everything you put into there will be kept anonymous. Over 200 accounting firms have now gone through this. And if you submit your info, we might, just might one day, either in a YouTube video or on the podcast, go through your firm and get some, some helpful advice. I mean, the more we have these conversations, the more everybody learns, the more we all get better at doing the accounting firm thing. Thank you to this person for their submission. Let's get into it. This is a $2.1 million a year firm. The submitter is the owner. About half of their money they make from tax work, the other half from accounting work. They're in a tier 2 city, so not a humongous market, not like a New York, Chicago, but just below that. Their best client. This is how they answer the question for best client. They said, we have a niche in the restaurant/bar space and in the medical industries. We love the clients for whom we're doing their monthly accounting services and tax planning throughout the year, and the tax return is a slam dunk because we're doing the books and we already know what's going on. These clients love us as well and don't complain about our fees. So they answered the best client question with restaurant and bar clients and medical industries. Pretty big, right? Pretty broad. Like one of those two is better than the other. Like it's okay to have a favorite. There is a best here, but also medical industries. Uh, what is that like, like a third of the US economy? You should have a clear answer for what's your best client. This is, this is a thing that we need to know both from a financial standpoint, understanding like where are we making money, but also from a what do we want to do and where's the biggest opportunity standpoint, which this is work to go through and figure out as a firm who is the best for us, what is the best opportunity. That's the thing we have to know and have to have a very specific answer to because it informs any level of effort we put into finding the next great client. And even if we're very busy and at capacity, the solution to capacity is a better client. And so like there is no world where we can stop taking new clients or not invest some time into finding the next great client because great clients are the only way you improve an accounting firm. Like an accounting firm at the end of the day boils down to what is the quality of the client list. So I would say this firm's like maybe a step removed from being a generalist firm. This level of specificity is great. And niching down is not this binary thing of you're either niche or you aren't niche. It's a spectrum. And so like if I'm the owner here, I'm thinking, okay, for who we've got today, how do we take one little step, one little half step further to get a little more specific and even more valuable for the folks who have the money to pay for us to solve their painful problems. They said their second best client would be ones where they're the clients doing their own accounting and they're just basically doing quarterly cleanup and filing the tax return at the end of the year. So this is more around like service mix. Their favorite client is the one where they're doing the accounting all year and the tax work. Second favorite is they're reviewing the accounting quarterly. Than doing the tax work. If this is the case, like, go all in on the whole, like, we only work with folks for whom we do the accounting all year. A lot of accounting firms have made this switch in the last 5 years where the only tax work they touch is tax work for clients for whom they're doing the accounting work all year round. And if you know that that's a better client for you, let's just be more selective there. Like, just cut off, like, no new clients who do not fit that mold. Team makeup. So you've got the owner. We've also got a senior tax manager. We've got 1 and 3/4 tax managers. So one is working 75%. So at the top, there's senior tax manager, basically 2 tax managers under that, but one is off a quarter time. They've got an accounting manager, 2 accountants in the Philippines, another half-time person that does accounting and tax, 4 part-time contractors during tax season, and then 1 and a half admins. That is very hard to follow. That is 10 or 11 people in total with like 6-ish people working outside of tax season, or 6 full-time equivalents, uh, not including the owner. So $2.1 million firm, they've got 5 to 10 people depending on the time of the year. That's pretty good in terms of revenue per employee. Like, that's pretty solid. That's why if you look at their financials, bottom line was $385 grand plus officer comp of $212,000. So what is that? That's just under $600,000. That's $590,000-something, not including, you know, benefits, stuff like that. Pricing. Their minimum for individual tax work was $600 last year, will be $700 this year, and goes up from there depending on what forms they're filing. All business returns started at $1,550 last year and will start at $1,850 this year, assuming that neat and complete information is received from the client. So basically just the tax work, not any bookkeeping cleanup. The average individual tax client last year was $1,800 and the average business return was $2,500. For accounting services, we've been struggling to put together a 3-tier pricing for new clients. Our average monthly fee for accounting work is probably $500 to $600. Nothing that's like, I mean, pricing is all relative. There's no such thing as really like good or bad pricing, only what will your next pricing be? Sales and marketing. We've never done any proactive marketing. We just started doing some LinkedIn activity at the beginning of the year through a contract person because we want to focus on growing our accounting revenue. We're going to start doing more proactive marketing this summer. Hiring a person to do your LinkedIn, I honestly would not recommend it for a number of reasons. A big one being LinkedIn just doesn't push to anybody's algorithm posts from businesses. By and large, business accounts are only used for sponsored, for promoted content, for content that you're going to put paid spend behind. And I don't recommend most accounting firms do any sort of paid spend because paid spend only works if you're amplifying something that already worked organically. So like my example is, you know, very high performing thing for us is our app recommendation database. If I make a post that performs really, really well and is like, hey, everybody, want to not waste tens of thousands of dollars making the wrong tech selections after the tax deadline? Go see this. Over 8,000 accounting firms have used it. This would have saved me over $100,000 in bad tech decisions. So if I make a post like that and it does very well, then I can put paid spend behind it and that could be worthwhile. But just going to an agency and saying like, hey, run some ads for us. That doesn't work like 99% of the time. A lot of us have burned money on that. That's why it doesn't work, because the underlying content, the post itself, is not a post that people will get excited about. But on LinkedIn right now, the only reason to really post through a business is when you have like some sort of paid amplification you're going to do of a post. Otherwise, organically, the stuff that you get through your feed on LinkedIn is almost going to be 100% from people, from individuals. And so pulling in a third-party person from like on contract They're going to be posting via the company account because LinkedIn actually doesn't allow for like, you know, a virtual assistant or something to have my login. LinkedIn will ban your account very quickly if you do any of that login sharing where someone else can have access to your account. Tell you what, it's a real pain in my neck. But if you're going to do any level of marketing activity that is worthwhile, you're in a big market. It's simply like showing up in person at events where these people you want to work with are hanging out like that time will will pay for itself so quickly, but it's much easier for us to throw money at it, right? Oh, there's somebody out here that does LinkedIn for people. Let me give them some money and they'll like sort of take this obligation off my plate. Unfortunately, that's not usually going to work. This is really an identity thing. So the owner is spending most of their time still in tax and taking calls with clients. We don't identify as marketing people, right? We like, we identify as the technicians who are doing the work. But there's a marketer over there that we can pay money to do the marketing thing. That usually doesn't work, but we get in our own way because it's not something that we identify as being experts in. Technology. They're using pretty much Thomson Reuters exclusively. They've got ACS, UltraTax, Practice, FC Planner. They use SSR for gathering tax docs. Ooh, signatures on all engagement letters and returns as well as their portals. They'll be moving to Canopy or Count this summer, which will replace a lot of this. All monthly and quarterly accounting clients are in QBO. The only AI we're using is ChatGPT. Canopy Account, great. That's really going to change a lot of stuff in the firm here. Worth looking at a tax intake automation solution as well. That's just such an easy win and such an easy bolt-on to save a bunch of time on 1040 work. On the accounting side, worth looking at Double. Double will help make the month-end closes that you're doing for clients much more turnkey. Pains. The accounting team is not a well-oiled machine yet. We've had some turnover in this department as one of our best bookkeepers retired a few years ago. The replacement we hired for her didn't work out, and the next hire also didn't work out. We hired two staff in the Philippines in August 2025, and it's going painfully slow to get them integrated. They make errors, miss deadlines, and are just missing too many items that our accounting manager is catching that they've discussed before. Both of them have 5 or 6 years of experience before starting with us. This department grew over the last couple of years with the number of clients we've taken on, and the whiff on hires has taken us to the point that we're not taking on new clients in this area. The accounting side of our business is 33% of our revenues, and the goal is to become more of a PASBA-style firm with very few one-off tax clients. That's kind of what we described earlier. PASBA is a membership organization that is super subscribed to this, like, you just do monthly recurring revenue clients. I'm trying to restructure things so our senior staff can run certain aspects of our services and team. Clients have a hard time letting go of me. Too many daily questions. I'm at the point where I'd love to get $3 million, but significant changes need to happen. It wouldn't bother me. If I never had to look at another 1040. Let's go back to tech. Double will help with a lot of this tech. Usually tech is not the solution here, but in the case of month-end close automation, tech can really help to put your month-end closes a little more on a turnkey process that where everyone's sort of following the same steps. Can be very difficult to get people doing the closes the same way and set a standardized process for all these different companies you're doing different month-end closes for. This is a case where tech actually can help there. In terms of getting quality people in, to me, this is a question of training and of how you are assessing people before you let them in the door. So with a better tech stack for doing month-end closes and clear training on like how to get from step 1 to step 10 through a month-end close, you have a much clearer picture of what you need somebody to be capable of so that you can then literally create a trial day project. Where they go through your actual process and, you know, a half day or something like that. And you can see if they can like follow those instructions. This is coming from, from me who spun up a bookkeeping practice inside of a tax practice. We built that to about $1.5 million a year in 18 months, and I made a lot of bad hires to be able to keep pace with that growth. Kind of what they're describing here, where it grew quickly, but then a lot of the folks they hired didn't work out. That was absolutely my experience too. What I ended up with was like about a 1, a 2 to 1 onshore to offshore ratio. So for every 1 offshore person, I had 2 onshore people. We are in the process of bringing that closer to parity to something closer to 1 to 1. But I went through a lot of folks that didn't work. I would, in my case, I would say I went through more onshore folks that didn't work than offshore folks. Maybe that was just roll the dice, luck of the draw. But yeah, building a system around how to get your team to consistently do month-end closes according to, to a standardized process. It's a big lift, hard thing to figure out, but makes it vastly easier to then assess people that you're hiring to see if they have the chops that are necessary to be able to work in that environment. What are they enjoying? They love working on the strategy of the firm, figuring out what services to provide, working on systems. There's certainly types of clients that I enjoy meeting with, but that the number of those clients they want to spend time with is decreasing. Fewer and fewer people every year. I don't know if you've done this before. For somebody like this that geeks on the strategy of a firm, being able to talk with other accounting firm owners is a tremendous relief and really, really valuable. Worth showing up to like in-person conferences like the city they're in. Like there are big conferences there every year. I have an online community. Realize we've got 700 firms, a lot of really, really smart people in there having high-level conversations. I can relate to this person. Really into the strategy side of it. That was what I had the most fun with, was talking strategy with other people that run firms. This person, they spent 3 years out of college at a retail company that was buying out other companies in Colorado. They then went on to spend 14 years in public accounting and they left when they were a director at a large national firm. They purchased this firm 15 years ago when it was just a team of 3 and about $675K in revenues. So they've tripled in terms of revenue. Unfortunately, they built the business running the majority of all new clients through them, the owner, to the point that they couldn't do that anymore and have been spending the last 2 to 3 years bringing in other senior-level staff to start taking over those client relationships and get more involved in the oversight of the team. Very similar to my journey, grew really fast and then had to sort of backfill the middle management layer. Takes time. There's a lot of wrong ways to do it. Again, I would say like I figured out most of my shortcuts learning from other accounting firms who had gone through that same transition. There's people listening to this who have gone through that transition, if you got any wisdom, pop that stuff down in the comments. But also, good for you, man. I mean, we're here talking about a person that's making $600 grand a year running an accounting firm. Doesn't mean they enjoy it. Doesn't necessarily mean that they aren't like overworked and paying the price for it in other ways. But to be at that income level, you have money to spend on solutions like you've got a cushion there to, to experiment and change things and try to get to the next version of this, which sounds like It's the version where you're less hands-on with clients, maybe working with a very small number of them, but really have your head in the space of strategy more than production. And that was, that was where I was. That was a hard transition for me. Ultimately, I was able to get totally out of the client work and it comes with tradeoffs. That's a blocker a lot of people have is they're like, I want to get totally out of the client work, but they're not willing to make the tradeoffs that are required to do that. Like, let's be clear, the firm that you are at and like doing a bunch of production at has to look different than the firm where you're not doing any production. Like that may look like hiring more expensive people than ever before. It might mean having to work with a different type of client that works for your team rather than the type of client that works with you. If you want to get out of the client work, the firm is just going to look different on the other side of that. But the cool thing, the opportunity is what you're then able to unlock in that next stage. Like the thing that we're all looking at right now, that's like, wouldn't it be nice if I got to that next point, that next milestone? The opportunity of doing that is the next thing that's on the other side of that, that we can't see yet. But oftentimes we're afraid to commit to going to that because we're like, oh, but then I'm going to give up all the stuff that I'm doing now. Gang, there's even more cool stuff on the other side of that that we just can't even see yet because we haven't gotten there. And that is the fun of being an entrepreneur, of every year looking different and of continuing to push ourselves to grow and to like learn the craft of what we're doing even better. But good for you. Thanks for submitting this stuff so we can have this conversation to begin with. If you want the chance to have your firm anonymously roasted, check out that form down in the show notes. Takes 10 or 15 minutes to complete and makes it so we can have a fun conversation about really cool firms around the world that are doing interesting things. If you are building an accounting team, you know just what a headache it is to get all of your team doing month-end closes the the same way, right? There's that stage where you're all in the same room and you can kind of like keep in sync because it's such a small team. But beyond a certain threshold, you're like, oh my gosh, everybody's choosing their own adventure. These engagements are taking on lives of their own. And it is what makes the latest feature drops from this episode's sponsor, Financial Sense, ever so important. So they are historically a practice management system for accounting firms. That is Financial Sense. But they're shipping a bunch of month-end close automation features inside of Financial Sense. So it has actually a deep integration into the accounting ledger, and it is pulling all the transactions into the platform to review, like, were there any weird outlier transactions? Like, it actually goes through, like, remember what it was, like 6 to 10 different categories of things that could be wrong, and it's identifying those transactions for you in an automated way. And if there's an issue, you can fix it right from within Financial Sense, and it will push that fix back to the accounting ledger. They also do the same with categorized transactions. So if you're doing the Amazon purchase hokey pokey with a client and you're like, hey, what is this? Can you give me a receipt? You can manage all of that from inside Financial Sense as well, giving you sort of like a single place that is everything that you need to run your bookkeeping practice. Some really cool stuff that they've been shipping, and I've got a special discount code that you can use. If you are a firm with 2 or more users, use the code JASON10 to get 10% off the annual team or scale plan. Worth checking out. I think you'll like it. To learn more, check out the link down in the show notes. It's that time of year. It really is when your tax hosting provider absolutely grinds to a halt because everybody's in there hammering on the tax software at the same time and the hosting servers are like, I need a break right now. There's— gang, there's a better approach. That approach is today's sponsor, Barido, who will give you your own private cloud. You don't want to share a cloud with whatever other weirdos or hosting their software in your cloud with you right now. I don't know what that guy's doing. You want your own cloud that never slows down. And would you believe me if I told you it is cheaper than you would believe to move to Verado from, say, your Thomson Reuters hosting, Drake hosting, something like that? It is both cheaper, it is faster. What? That's two things. Kind of a no-brainer. They can move you over a weekend, and they can even handle all of your, like, outsourced IT support, like function as your IT department. In fact, the cost to have Verado be your IT department and do all of your hosting is less than the cost of just Thomson Reuters Virtual Office. Buddy, this one is a no-brainer on the list of to-dos to knock out right after April 15th. Buddy, you're going to want to talk to Verado. To learn more, check out the link down in the show notes. Enough on this firm. Let's get that mailbag out because we got a whole bunch of questions to get through. Okay, these questions come from email, from DMs, from my phone. Text me, leave me a voicemail at 1516-980-4968. Just pull over right now, put me in my phone. Put— no, put me in your phone just in case you ever need it. You never know when there will be an accounting emergency. First up, We got a voicemail.

Acquiring a tax practice through a listing site, when that makes sense, and if so, how would you structure the deal and what is the ideal timing look like? So most firms listed on these sites are frankly garbage in my opinion, but the good ones, they want like 1.25 or 1.5x revenue and a whole lot of cash at closing. I've done some deals with local CPAs to acquire a small book and then I have paid them based on collections over time. In those cases, a lot of the prior work done was terrible and needed a lot of fixing, and oftentimes a big chunk of the clients that were expected to come over never actually did. Uh, so then when I think about that in the context of paying upfront for a book of clients, uh, that is terrifying, um, because obviously don't want to pay for clients that aren't coming over. So in what scenario would you consider buying a practice and how would you structure the deal? Um, and then finally, uh, the timing seems tricky given the nature of our business. Again, this is a tax compliance shop, so, um, how would you balance the timing of making sure that you have billable work so you're not burning cash from the deal while also managing the transition so that I'm not driving myself mad because, you know, maybe it's November, December and there's a quick turnaround before the new tax season begins? So enjoy your content. I would love to hear your thoughts on this.

Thanks. Okay. Here's my take. Thank you for the voicemail, by the way. Here's my take for small accounting firm purchases. Purchases, let's say firms $3 million and under, which is 90% of firm M&A. It virtually never makes sense for a firm of this size to pay cash upfront for all the reasons you just mentioned. A lot of the clients won't come over. Sometimes the incentives are messy with the previous owner where I want the previous owner motivated to get those clients over to me. And the— by far the best way to do this is with some sort of clawback or by ensuring that they just get paid when you collect. And so the most vanilla version of this is like 20% of collections over 5 years capped at whatever the collections for that client was at the time of the transaction. So if I get a client and double their fees, the previous owner isn't onside for the doubling. They're only onside for as much as the client was paying previously. Can't tell you how many people I know who did a cash upfront deal and came to regret it for all the reasons that you're describing. There is so much overhype and overinflation of what accounting firms sell for, and there's all this excitement around M&A, and this is more around like multiples for the sales of big firms, though, by the way, most of that stuff is totally blown out of proportion and made up. It is. I mean, it's kind of similar to the problem of we have so much education in our space that's made by software vendors. That it ends up being biased. A lot of it's very good, but it's also biased. So much of the information we have around M&A is coming from folks associated with those transactions that just want you to be into M&A and like excited about the multiples and all that. I know so many of the people that are doing a lot of the biggest deals in North America right now, it's not real. Like, and even then, even when somebody does land an astronomical multiple, for a firm that's $10 million and under, an astronomical multiple is 2x. Even in situations like that, it is all the strings attached that matter. Then it is the earnout. It is, well, none of the employees leave. It's, well, if X, Y, or Z happens, then that multiple goes down from 2 real quick. So this person mentioned 1.5. No small local firms are trading at 1.5. The only thing that I could maybe push to 1.5 is a firm like we were just talking about, a firm where half of it was, was accounting revenue, half of it was tax revenue. If you can take a $2.1 million firm like that, maybe push it to $2.5 and get it to 100% recurring revenue, you can make an argument there for a firm like that trading at 1.5x. But your run-of-the-mill local firm that would ever even hit a listing site, which buying an accounting firm from a listing site is like hiring an employee from Indeed. If they're hanging out on Indeed, indeed, it's because they didn't have an abundance of other options. Firms on listing sites. I would like— the person said, by and large, they're garbage. Um, the best way to sell an accounting firm is in your network because there's tremendously more value to be extracted from M&A when you know the people you're buying from and when you're like-minded in how you run firms. Like, the amount of M&A that happens in my private community is wild because all these people are very like-minded. Like, they're people like you that listen to the podcast. And they're like, I want to meet more people like this. That is a vastly better firm to then go and acquire than some random thing on an accounting firm listing site where you know nothing about that person. In all likelihood, like they are just trying to ride that thing out to retirement. Only thing I think I didn't cover there was timing. What makes the most sense from a timing standpoint? There's no perfect answer here. Like even if you get into November and December and then you're like, holy cow, this has all got to come together fast because tax season is just around the corner. Like in some ways that's better because you get cash in the door faster after the transaction than if you did it, say, in May. The bigger thing is what the cash cycle looks like post-transaction. Most run-of-the-mill accounting firms, they bill, especially tax shops, bill after the fact. And you oftentimes have a situation where you started a tax project in February that doesn't even like get completed and billed until October or even November. That's obviously a brutal cash cycle. This can be scary for folks to do oftentimes after a transaction because they're already worried about rocking the boat too much and clients leaving. But if you can get to a better way of them paying you, and this is usually either directly through your practice management system or with a proposal tool, taking deposits upfront is like the best thing that you can do to get cash flow going after an acquisition. We have a lot of fear of like, well, we've never done this with people before, like, They're not used to putting down any money upfront. There will be some clients who complain, but by and large, we usually overthink this one. We think it'll be a bigger deal than it actually is. I wouldn't make people put 100% upfront if they've never done this before, but 20% upfront, 50% upfront, that's not too much to ask. And it's really only the changing that's hard for people. Like the next new client that comes in, if you tell them that's the deal, they'll be like, okay, cool, no problem, because that's not an unreasonable thing, right? But think about what the cash cycle looks like. Usually this isn't too hard of a nut to crack because the cash cycle's just atrocious for most tax firms who are fully billing after the fact. I mean, I think in there there was a question of, is this worth doing? That's kind of the big question. There's a lot of firms on the market that to me have no value. Like anybody who is doing work papers on paper still, to me, the value of that firm immediately goes to zero because getting the team to learn to do that thing digitally takes years. Very hard to make those people efficient. I wouldn't touch a firm like that with a 10-foot pole. The fact that somebody else would doesn't mean that you should. But we got to think, in the whole world right now, what are the best places to make connections and find really cool firms to acquire? The answer is almost certainly not listing websites. So I would say that's the bigger thing is if we're trying to even make an argument for is it worth buying a firm right now, I'd argue we're scraping the bottom of the barrel. So it's— this is a harder argument to make than getting networked with other accounting firm owners, showing, you know, showing up at conferences, just being part of the conversation a little more. So, you know, a lot of other folks— in fact, PASBA came up in Roast a Firm. I mean, a membership organization like that, they've got 300, 400 firms in there now. PASBA is a great place to meet firms who are very often doing M&A. So just, I would say, get more plugged into that stuff and you'll almost certainly find higher quality targets. That will trade at slightly higher multiples. But even the listing sites and like what people think their businesses are worth, I mean, no traditional firm, no traditional accounting firm is trading at 1.5x in the United States. Like that just does not happen unless it is a modern firm largely on recurring revenue. Next question. I hear you say that the best way to build a new firm is through other firms' hand-me-downs. That is basically networking with other firms and taking the clients that they no longer want. And here's the question, but what builds trust? That's the hard thing, right? Like, how do you break through to those firms and be like, hey, you can trust me, like, send me your work. Nothing beats in-person, like, and actually having a conversation with these people. And this is a hard thing to do. This happened a ton at the live events we hosted last year, which are like small events in these local markets in the US. We're going to be doing 20 more of them in May and June, and it's taking so much time to get the ticketing set up because it's kind of complex. Hoping we'll have ticketing set up for those events in the next couple of weeks. But we're going to be in 20 cities in the U.S. Like if you're anywhere near those markets, that's an unbelievably good place for you to show up because it's just a bunch of firm leaders hanging out who like, I mean, you go to Seattle and you have over 100 people who are into the podcast and like watch the content like all in one market, in one room. Like that's a crazy high-context group of people. So that, I mean, that in my opinion kind of doesn't exist elsewhere. Maybe the next best thing is conferences, but after that and with somebody else asked a similar question and they're like, how do I get like local firms to pay attention to me? Honestly, I think the answer is if they have an office, food, sending food baskets with a note that's like, hey, there's more where this came from. If we can hop on a call or grab coffee or something like that. Just in person is how you cut through the noise and convince somebody that you're legit. It's not to say that there aren't digital versions of that that you can make work. Like, as with most things, getting specific here is kind of the key. Like, if you're the best bookkeeper for taxidermists, it'll be much easier to get the attention of tax pros that work with taxidermists. So there are ways to break through digitally. It's just a lot harder than in person. Jennifer Thorpe, is it safe to have Claude review general ledgers and financial statements, would you redact client names? It's a great question. Claude Chat, that is the chat assistant on Claude Online. If you're on Claude's business plan, which right now is called— chat is called Claude for Teams. Yes, that online chat assistant for me is secure enough to review financials without redacting any sort of client information. Their online chat assistant comes with SOC 2 Type 2 security certification, like all very, very high-level stuff, actually a higher level than many commonplace apps in the accounting firm ecosystem. But importantly, Claude Cowork, that is the app that runs locally from the same provider Claude, I would not put financial statements in. And that is because Claude Cowork is still in Anthropic's research preview, which means it falls outside of what is under the SOC 2 Type 2 certification. So Cowork today is not as secure as Claude's just chat assistant. And so I'd be comfortable putting financials into the chat assistant. I would not yet be comfortable putting unredacted financials into Cowork. Redaction, like you can actually get a long ways with redaction. Even medical information, if it's redacted, is not considered sensitive information. It's why medical companies can sell all your medical data to Google. Practically, to do this across an accounting firm and set the expectation of like, oh, it's okay to do this as long as it's redacted. I probably wouldn't do that because it's hard to police and easy to make mistakes. You mentioned putting general ledgers into the tool. You can't really redact a general ledger. Like there's, there's so much detail in there that probably shouldn't be going into the AI tool. So I probably wouldn't even try to redact financials and put them in Cowork., but Claude's chat assistant is plenty secure for me to be able to do that. It's just like ChatGPT for business where you've got adequate guardrails there, in my opinion, even for sensitive use cases. Can we do a quick one for a 25-year-old early career accountant? I'm currently a 25-year-old accounting student doing my master's. I'm confused and perplexed seeing all this unfold right now with AI. What do you think the future looks like for this profession? Uh, I don't know. Great question. But you know what I also don't know is what the future looks like for any profession. People love to target accounting for whatever reason. I think it's a combination of people don't understand it and it sounds like a thing that's deterministic and just kind of rules-based, but it's not. But also people target it because they don't like it. Like it's why they always go after tax pros. They're like, what's something we could kill with AI? Artists? No. I know. Taxes. Everybody hates taxes. That's a great use for AI. The reality is there's a lot of professions that have been way more disrupted by AI than accounting right now. If we get to the place where accounting is super, super disrupted, it's because all of white-collar work has been super disrupted. So what does the future look like for accounting? Uh, could AI replace accountants? Almost, almost certainly. At the very least, it will change what we're doing. I love the people that still say AI won't replace accountants. Accountants. Like, can we just stop trying to put the blanket over everybody and get real about like, here's what we need to do? It will change how every accountant works. That's not the same as replacing every accountant, but I'm not like anti-accounting or wouldn't discourage people going into accounting, because show me another profession that looks safe right now. It doesn't really exist. So much talk about AI right now and the recent steps these models have made in the past couple of months. We've been talking about it a lot on podcast, but the company that probably nailed putting these models to work before anybody else, it's probably this episode's sponsor, Maker's Hub. They've been using AI to take the pain out of accounts payable management, push the automation of that entire department to totally like new levels. I would say it's probably the only department in accountingdom that has truly been turned on its head by AI. And every time you see a powerful new AI model launch, oftentimes we think about our software vettings and we're like, Do something. Like, why are you not using this yet? If you're gonna bet on any horse in the accounting software space for who will, like, start running with this stuff right away and get the most out of it, MakerSub, it's a pretty good bet. So right now they're doing really hairy accounts payable stuff. So if you have to do project tracking, like receiving, inventory management, stuff like that, MakerSub is tremendous for that. Whether you manage this stuff for your clients or whether your client just has to fuss with it. We've actually got some great demos of MakersHub on my YouTube channel, worth checking out or sending to a client. But to learn more about MakersHub, check out the link down in the show notes. So this is a true story. 7 years ago, I'm talking with this gal that runs an accounting firm, and she's very progressive in many ways, and she's kind of just showing me her model for how she does a number of different things. And then it just comes up as an afterthought that, oh yeah, most of my staff is offshore. And I'm like, what did you just say? You're— the people that are doing your work are not even in the country? And she's like, well, some of them are, but a lot of them doing the heavy lifting are offshore. She said these folks are easier to find than onshore hires. They are just as productive, if not more, and they are half to a quarter the cost. And I was like, but America and disclosures and all these things, right? And it wasn't until I saw somebody that I respected for whom this was the norm that I was like, okay, maybe I gotta reassess kind of our position on all this stuff. Now thankfully, these days we have groups that help accounting firms with this, that have done this with loads of firms. Today's sponsor, TeamUp, they will help you do this for the first time if you've never done it before. TeamUp's actually run by a former bookkeeping firm owner who just had a hard time finding good accounting talent offshore, so they went out, they hired a bunch of recruiters in the Philippines, and they pull in the very best people. By the way, I mean, all the, all the top 100 are investing in the Philippines. Like, there's a tremendous amount of accounting talent in the Philippines, and so they're pulling in bookkeepers, tax folks, executive assistants, whatever you need. And TeamUp specifically has a direct hiring model, which means all you do is you pay TeamUp one time a recruiting fee to go and find you your next dream hire. It's, it's as simple as that. But if you haven't done it before, you can have all sorts of questions and blockers and all that, right? Don't just sit with that stuff. Talk with TeamUp. Because they've helped a load of firms navigate these exact same questions. Learn more about TeamUp. Check out a link down in the show notes. I want to call out this, uh, as a response to a, uh, short video that we did around pricing. They said, I think it's a bad trend in business communities to encourage charging more for less work. I think the incentives need to be how we provide more value, not how do we milk as much money as we can from every customer. So is it wrong to try to charge more of your customers? Here's what I always come back to on this is the buyer is choosing. At the end of the day, it's totally up to them. They're opting into a price, and if they opt into a price, it means that the value to them of what I'm delivering is worth the price that they're willing to pay. Now, is the value that I'm delivering 1x the price? Is it 10x the price? I would say the bigger issue for most of us is that we undercharge because we don't realize how much money we're worth. And what usually causes this is we have some clients that don't value us at all, and so they complain about pricing. So because those people take up so much headspace, we chronically underprice all the work that we do. Yet we don't hear from the people at the other end of the client list who would happily pay us 3 times as much. So we do have a habit of chronically undercharging because we listen to the stinkers, but not the really happy clients. But we also need to be asking the question like, how do we focus on the most valuable, valuable problems that we can solve? For the reason that we just mentioned, some clients, they don't value what we do. Other clients do. How do we double down on the ones that do and continue finding more people who value us even more and then charge them more for that? Like, I don't see like where the moral issue is there. I see it as a positioning of your business around the people for whom you are most valuable. Like, aren't those the best people to hang out around? The ones who you're helping the most. And price is the best signal we have to identify who these people are. This is maybe the best argument for 3-tier proposals is until you put multiple prices in front of your clients, you won't know which clients value you more than they're currently paying today. If we charged everyone $100 and 20 people complained, who of the other 80 would have paid $200? The only way we know is by giving them the opportunity to pay $200. And so if we don't think through this, and if we don't go after the clients for whom we are most valuable, then what is our business? Our business is something that's kind of sitting in the middle where it's not serving the most valuable pains that it can. It means we're not helping people ultimately as much as we could, but then even from a profitability standpoint, we're in this kind of like limbo where we've got clients who aren't all willing to pay the same thing. And that's where you end up with this firm that is laden with like low-bono work where we give these sort of half discounts to people who, uh, like we think need the discount, but usually these people like have homes and mortgages and drive a Lexus. So my take here is I'm building a business around the most valuable pains that I can solve, and I've got a real like barbell approach to helping people and being mission-oriented. I will go after the most valuable problems I can solve and lean into profit maximization because I believe that's actually the best way to help people who really need help and have nothing to pay. If my business becomes mired in all of these people that are just like hangers-on of the accounting firm that are getting a crazy deal and will never leave because they know they can't get that deal anywhere else, then I'm paying the price for that. My, my, my family's paying the price for that. And then I don't have the money and the time to actually give back to the people who really need help. So I don't see like pushing the price as this like amoral thing. I see it as the way that you figure out what are the most painful problems that I'm solving right now and how can I continue to position my business around those. 3 more to go. So are you going to boycott ChatGPT? This might have been around the— I'm just now understanding what this question means around these— some of the government stuff. So like they did a deal with the Defense Department. They've since kind of reeled that back around, like the ability of militaries to use AI. Which is just like, oh my gosh, the future of like combat is going to be insane from like drones to like, I mean, just how good the robotic stuff in China is now. I think that's actually what this question was. As I'm reading it, I now realize that I think I mean, it's absolutely worth considering. Like, do I feel good giving my money to any company that's doing stuff that I don't agree with? Like, that's more of a personal decision than a decision for like a podcaster to tell you like, this was wrong. But boy, OpenAI got a bunch of flack for the deal they did with the Defense Department, and they've since rolled it back a little bit. Now, the irony is, is Anthropic has always said, you're not allowed to use our models for bad stuff like this. And the military has been using it anyways because Anthropic has the best models right now. The whole, like, nationalization of AI models feels just around the corner because when an AI model is good enough to, like, give you these economic advantages and, like, I mean, we're already doing this to a degree where, like, China supposedly shouldn't, isn't allowed to have access to the best chips for training AI models. Like it's already been nationalized to a degree, but we are just scratching the surface of the whole, like, like we are just walking into a sci-fi B movie right now. I want to call out this comment, which was on a YouTube video featuring a specific product. It's not even important what the product was, but it is a great question. All this looks awesome, but the big question is, will clients actually use it? I have a hard time even getting clients to comment on spreadsheets. This seems like more friction as it's one more thing my clients need to learn how to use and log into. I work with a lot of blue-collar owners who refuse change and don't have time. What are your thoughts? There's 100 versions of this, and I mean, this was like 5 years ago. Everybody was like, everybody hates— all my clients hate portals. And now portals have kind of become a little more of the norm. But because accounting is such a huge spectrum of folks, I mean, we still have people that are like, I'll never give up QuickBooks Desktop. I think the answer to this question is like, for sure, there's a reality where you put this in front of clients and they're annoyed and they don't use it. And we've done whole podcast episodes on this in the past where it's like, how do I get clients to use the tech the way that I want them to use it? And it's like, well, if you send it to them once, plan on most of them not using it or not paying attention to it. It's going to take multiple times of, of recommunicating that and setting the expectation of here's where this thing has to happen. And a lot of times when clients don't do it, it's out of habit, not out of malice, or not because they don't want to. But the, the other really big thing to keep in mind here is I can't do it, but other firms can. Am I willing to give in to that competitive disadvantage? And so this tool that we're talking about here, arguably the fastest growing tool in like the accounting industry in the last 5 years with thousands of happy firm users. And one of the common things you hear about this tool is the clients actually really like The portal experience, the login, like it's very well done. It's very organized. And so if you find yourself at a spot where you're, you're paralyzed there, there's a question of, is anybody else actually using this? Like, is anybody actually making this work? If you don't have a clear answer to that, like, gotta invest in the network, man. Like, like who else do you know who has used it or has tried to use it? What worked? What didn't work? Because telling yourself that story, while it might be a true story, is to a degree like giving in to a disadvantage. And this is also a factor in like, who are the clients that are the best to serve? Like if you have a client that will never change, that's a knock against the client. Like that becomes a risk to your business and to your bottom line if you then have to serve them inefficiently. But that being said, rolling out a tech product to a client base, there's a way that will fail 100% of the time, and there's a way that will work better more of the time. So the devil is so much in the details. This is totally the type of situation where you got to sit down with other people who have done the similar, similar things and be like, what worked about it? What didn't work about it? I mean, this is why I'm in my community. I'm bringing up my community again. Sorry. The app, the app from this video is Double, formerly known as Keeper. In our community now, we like every other month, we have a meetup of like a whole bunch of people who are active users of the tool. And it's just, it's for things just like this. Show me how you use it for XYZ. How did the rollup work in this case or the rollout work in this case, in that case? Like, and my community is not the only place having these conversations, but that's, that truly is the solution is, is go to other firms and see what are they doing, what worked, what didn't work. And you'll just have access to higher quality information to make the right decision for you. Last question. I like this guy usually. This was a YouTube comment, but this almost has me not listening to him anywhere. I looked everywhere for what he's talking about with TurboTax being $1,749 for someone to go to TurboTax and prepare their small business return. It doesn't exist. Furthermore, 90% of small businesses will tell you to go pound sand if you quoted them $2K for tax prep. I lost a fan, gang. I lost a fan all because of one stupid little short that we published. So we were talking about how TurboTax, which if you're not in the US, it's like a productized Tax prep service last year, last tax year, they charged, I think it was, it was either $1,700 or $1,800 for federal-only small business full-service tax prep. And so that's, you go to TurboTax, you get paired with a tax pro, and they do the entirety of the return. It was federal only and it didn't include books cleanup. And we've got the whole, the whole website screenshot. It was a big headline. Everybody's talking about it last year. This year they've hidden all their pricing, like for good reason. Like so we can't dunk on it. This commenter, they went out and tried to find the pricing and they couldn't find it this year. But the big thing that they said here that's super telling and there's— we all have a version of this that is such an easy trap to slip into. They said 90% of small businesses will tell you to go pound sand if you quoted them $2K for tax prep. Some of you will hear that and will agree. Some of you will hear that and are rolling your eyes. In fact, we just went through this very real firm, right? What was the average that they charged last year for business tax return? We've actually got this number. The average business tax return last year for them, $2,500. So this person saying 90% of small businesses will tell you to pound sand if you quoted them $2,000 for tax prep. We got to realize our reality is fully shaped by the things we've been exposed to. And there's so much more out there than we realize. This person's normal is $2K is astronomical for tax prep. That's totally fine. There was a time when that was the case for me too. This person's normal is $2.5K is the average. That's totally fine. There's people listening to this for whom $10K would be a joke. They would never touch small business tax prep for under $10K. I knew somebody running a firm who was in the same town as a large firm that put out a new policy that said, we're going to cut every client under $10K of annual fees. And this firm, this person I know, they were getting $8,000 a year, $6,000 a year, $5,000 a year tax clients just hand over fist when their average fees were much less than that. So recognize wherever we are at right now, the way we think about what's possible is just totally shaped by what we have today. But that doesn't mean that's the only reality that exists. And so what do we do with this information? Well, we got to think, Like, what do we want to be our reality? Like, we choose who do we want to work with and what do we want to get to? How do we make a new normal your normal if that's what you want? Like, you can look back 18 months or 5 years at the prices you charged back then and you're like, most of us are like, dang, we were giving it away. That was you. Like, that was the same person. Like, you've grown. And 3 years from now, you're probably going to look back on what you're doing right now and be like, yikes, how was I even running a business like that? The trap is to not recognize that your reality is subjective and that at the end of the day, we have control over what our normal is. If I want to find a new normal, go find the people for whom the normal I want is their normal. If I want my average business tax prep fee to be $2.5K, this person needs to go hang out with this person, right? You have those conversations, you spend enough time together, their normal becomes your normal. That's the fun of all this is that we can outgrow the bubble, the version of this that we thought was possible, the tunnel vision that we have inside of our own firms. Like, it is a big old world out there and so much is possible. We get to choose what we want to go after and lean into. That is a gift, man. Like, staying trapped in our own little, little reality, our own little four walls with our stationary desk without wheels. That's a choice. And I choose to be out in the world. Learning from other cool people who are doing this stuff, making friends, because that is a whole lot more fun way to go through all of this. It's also a lot more profitable way to run your business. Like, you learn a tremendous amount and pick these things up from other smart people. And it is the very best part of small firm running. Honestly, the— like, back when I ran a firm and I didn't know anybody, that was really, really hard. And the thing I'm most proud of in this content that we do is I think For many people, we find them. You may have found this podcast and you realize, oh, people are out here like having these conversations. Like imagine you're in Seattle and you hear a guy on a podcast like, hey, I'm going to host this event. And you go there and there's 100 other people from your city who are into the same thing. That is life-changing. It really is. Because as supportive as the people around you can be or your spouse can be or something like that, like if you're a firm leader, if you're in an accounting firm, nobody understands what you do quite like other people who do what you do. And it means the, like, the most important way we can invest our time then is in getting to like the place, the reality, the understanding of how the world works that we are going to most enjoy. Because accountingdom is big enough to support whatever your interest is, whatever thing you're into. Like, those people need accountants too. It's kind of the best part of accounting is everybody needs accountants. So decide, who do I want to work with? How much do I think I can get paid for doing XYZ? See if other people have done that. See if other people are there and then make it happen. Rather than focusing on, on our self-limiting beliefs, getting stuck, trapped in like whatever your business, whatever your life is today. I love that question. That question, which was not even a question. It was, I can't even follow this guy anymore. But you know what? Had they not left that comment, we wouldn't be able to have this conversation and be like, you know, that's actually pretty limiting because I just heard from a firm that's charging actually more than this person saying is even possible. What does that mean? It means you probably have a version of that right now yourself, and I probably have a version of that right now myself as well. So let's keep growing, keep talking about it, and keep getting better. Gang, you're looking sharp today. You get some good sleep last night? Appreciate you coming and hanging. Keep those questions coming in. I love doing the mailbag section at the end of these, and I'll see you back here soon so we can— so we can do it all again. All right, see you there.