601 Why Hiring Is Now Impossible [Practical accounting firm hiring advice]

Hey, Jason here. Before we get into the episode, we are just 2 weeks from the beginning of my 20-city live tour in-person events. These events we designed from scratch to be just for accounting firms. They are super fun. You'll meet a whole bunch of local accountants who also listen to the podcast. You get some continuing education. It's a bunch of snacks, an optional dinner. It is the only event I've seen where you can get continuing education credits with a drink in your hand. I want to see you there. It's happening in May and June. Did I mention this? Over 750 accountants have already signed up. I want to see you out there. To see the tour dates and get tickets for you and your team, head over to JasonOnFirms.com/events. Enough about your workshops. Let's get on to the actual episode. Many people say it is now impossible to hire accountants into your accounting firm. You may have felt this pain even if you are a solo person. Gripped with the stress of should I hire an admin? Should I hire my first person? Clear up to gimungous firms who are like, where are all the warm accounting bodies? Today, a deep dive on how to navigate every flavor of this, whether you are— whether you are making your first hire or your first thousandth hire in 2026. How do we navigate this? I'm actually going to dig into a bunch of nuance and sort of the different forms that this is taking inside of firms right now based on what we're seeing from some data that we got actually out of my last run of workshops. Also, did you hear the news that OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, just launched their own cloud cowork competitor? Big news today. We're also talking about whether it's time to ditch QuickBooks and are simple tax shops, accounting firms that do simple tax returns, are they about to go out of business? Plenty to cover. Let's get into it, gang. Come on. Take a seat right over here. Yeah, come on. If you're in the back row, come forward. The whole first 3 rows are open. Welcome to a new series on the podcast. The Dirty Dozen. Here's the thing. Last year I hosted, I hosted parties all around the United States and over 1,000 accounting firms came up and part of the registration process, they told me, what are the biggest things that are blocking your firm? So I've got a bunch of data on like, what are the most painful things for these people contextualized by their firm size, by their favorite apps, by whether they're the big boss or a staff person. And we're going to go through a series of the 12 biggest things that are blocking accounting firms. I think most of these, if not all, are going to be be relatable. And today we're getting into hiring. This might be the hardest lesson to learn in building an accounting firm. When you come from just doing accounting work for somebody else's firm and one day being like, wow, that guy's, that guy's making a lot of money, maybe I can do that for myself. Then you come over here and you start doing that work for yourself and you're like, whoa, this is a lot more than just doing the work now. I would say the hardest mindset shift, uh, for me at least, was realizing that at the end of the day, it was literally 100% about the people, both on my team side, but also on the client side. Everything boiled down to, can I find a person that's slightly better? Or can I find this, uh, maybe this unicorn I've created in my head? If only that person were real, all of my problems would go away. And so we know this like deep down, but if you looked at your timesheet, whether you make a timesheet or not, if you followed yourself around and you were a fly on the wall all day, what are inputs? What are, what are inputs into the cosmic machine of chance? Lead anyone to believe that we are spending our time in a way that's going to make it likely that that magic person would find us? This is where most of us get stuck, because we are so heads down in production. We're overcapacity. We are running on that hamster wheel so hard. But the thing that's going to get us off the hamster wheel is, is the person that's going to find us. But I don't have time to do any of the things, the things that are going to make that person find me. I know you're like, Jason, I just got past the tax deadline. I have not even evacuated the caffeine from my body yet. Would you chill out and get off my back? Here's what we're going to do. This is a big, broad topic that is driven by a lot of different issues in different firms. And so we're going to dig into basically 9 flavors of this, this whole notion of hiring being impossible, because there's a whole bunch of different ways firms can get to the same statement. And oftentimes it's a number of these contributing factors that all kind of work together to make finding that next person really hard. So we're going to run through all 9 of those today. And by the end, it's going to be— it's going to be super easy for you to find the next accountant of your dreams. Simple as that. Quick plug, because we are getting down to the wire. If you're trying to hire anybody local or you're an accountant that's trying to find a better firm, go to my events that are coming up in 20 cities over the next 2 months. I can't tell you how much— how many people found great hires, how many people made relationships with other firms that became referral relationships. Mergers, acquisitions, all of this stuff came out of the events that we ran last year because it turns out if you walk into a room with a whole bunch of other like-minded people who also listen to the podcast, cool stuff happens. So in May and June, we're doing those events in 20 cities again. Go to jasononfirms.com/events to grab your ticket. There's even a VIP ticket, although I think we are sold out of most of them, where you get early entry and we just hang out and pal around. Kind of. There's a bunch of snacks too. Okay. So let's dig into the driving factors behind this notion that hiring feels impossible. Number 1, let's just acknowledge like the notion that it just can't be done. Like the mental block, like people actually believing that because for many of us, it might just be that. It might be that mental block because we haven't found success with it. The thing you need to recognize is hiring is not impossible because there's other people that are doing it very successfully. And what this is, is really a plateau. It is for my current approach, for the things that I've tried so far, for the person I am today and the things I know how to do, I've gotten as far as I can get with this approach. And so the approach, like the assumptions built into how to do this, the things we know, something in there has to change to overcome that plateau, right? Somewhere out there, there is someone hiring hundreds of accountants per month that like, that's actually happening. The nice thing about accounting, there are loads of accountants out there, absolutely everywhere. The world is teeming with them. Now we need more of them. But if I reframe this a different way, I think, I think maybe you'll get what I mean. You look out there at the normal distribution of accounting firms and you know just how low that bar is, right? It's like you're on a road trip in some random town and you drive by this hole-in-the-wall accounting firm. Do you do what I do, which is look at that accounting firm? And I mean, there's, it's a big part of me that thinks that's probably just a crap firm and not a fun place to work. I imagine just a whole lot of cubicles and paper files and dust bunnies and tight hip flexors. Like, that is the average accounting firm, at least in the United States. I imagine most of the rest of the world as well. And you hear, you see the conversation online about like just how bad their accountant is and all of this. And we're all trying to overcome that, right? Like we're all trying to not reinforce that notion, but I mean, honestly, 80% of the firms out there, they are probably that, right? So should this not give us hope when it comes to hiring? Am I truly better than those firms? If I am, then like, I'm in like the 80th percentile of cool firms to work for, kind of just by default, by having a more modern mindset for how to run a firm. So we can't give in to this idea, this block, that it is impossible because it is not. There are so many accountants out there, even with a shortage in the industry, say we have 50% fewer accountants than we need. If I'm in the 80th percentile, I should still be in a good spot, right? So like, are we actually doing something novel? Are we running our firm differently? If so, those people are out there and they want to find you. In all likelihood, we're just not putting enough effort into being out there and being seen because that is not a natural thing for us. But if— I mean, if you are listening to this podcast, then just think, think about our entire industry. If you bump in the wild into somebody that listens to this podcast and say you have a conversation about AI or the future of accounting firms or something like that, you're not the 80th percentile. Like, you are like the 1%ers of people who are thinking ahead on this stuff. It's part of why I really just want accountants that listen to this podcast to go to work for accounting firms that listen to this podcast. And if you're either of those people, leave a comment. It's a small world. You wouldn't be— you would be shocked at the wild things that can stem from YouTube comments. Could literally change your life. Okay. Second thing, the first hire paralysis. This applies to folks who are our solos, or if you're making a first hire of a new type. Let me give you a couple of the quotes, like actual quotes from people deciding who and when to hire next. I'm close to reaching my bandwidth on tax prep by myself, and I would like to hire someone, either a contractor or full-time, but I'm also not sure if I should hire an admin so that it frees up more of my time to work on the business. Next person, hiring employees. I'm not sure if I should get an assistant, a bookkeeper, or someone else. Do I go offshore? Do I go local? Next person, timing hiring my next employee with potential new clients. Next person, should I hire a HighLevel person or wait another year? Everybody is paralyzed by some version of this. And to maybe knock out the easiest version of this conversation, if you don't have anyone on your team, if you are one person, almost certainly the right answer is not to then go to two people. Because if you do the math on that, that is doubling the human beings, the amount of work the capacity of the entire firm in theory. And what that ends up being is a lot of work for you. The vastly easier way to ease yourself into managing other people is starting with a fractional, probably VA, virtual assistant. You don't want 40 hours of their time. It is like, I mean, if you have a child, it's the difference between having to watch somebody's child 10 hours a week versus 40 hours a week. Yes, you'll give them the iPad most of the time anyways, and they'll be sort of self-sufficient, but they will break things. They will get into trouble in ways that you're not expecting. So there is, there's no version where you make your first hire, you plop them down for 40 hours a week and they are self-sufficient and go off and do a great job. Hiring is as much about you as it is about them. And like working out the kinks on how you onboard people and just learning how to integrate other human beings into your business. That is a, that's a learned thing. Like you don't want to just jump into it and do it irresponsibly because this is somebody else's livelihood that we're talking about as well. And I know, I know that can create a lot of anxiety too, but it's also one of those things where you kind of just gotta do it. Like to, to know if it's gonna work for you, you have to experience it. And like, this is also one of those things, kind of like niching down where you almost have to plan on just not doing it right. Like the plan should be to grow and to do it better the next time. Uh, especially, I mean, my luck with onshore hiring, and this is still the case in my business now. I mean, you can basically plan on half the people you hire with any level of vetting and trial days and all that, half the people you hire basically flaming out in the first 3 months when you find out they are alcoholics or just can't show up for work every day. Like, you kind of just have to build that into your planning so that you don't spend 6 months looking for somebody and then finally make a hire and then have your heart broken 2 weeks in when you find out that the person who you hired is actually in a state penitentiary, and now you have no idea who this person is that you're actually talking to. So if you're making your first hire, start fractional. Even beyond that, fractional, if you can find a way to do it, makes a lot of sense. It's less of a burden on the team. But if you're making a different type of hire for the first time, say hiring an admin for the first time or a bookkeeper for the first time, all the same rules apply. In a perfect world, you can make some friends who have done the same. Are there other firms that you know who have been at this same spot, man, if you can pick their brain, it will save you like years of zigzagging and doing the wrong things. This is the value of community. This is the value of knowing other people that run accounting firms. So for sure do that. But at a certain point, you, you just gotta go for it. Get the information first for sure. But then after that, carve out the time, make sure you've got the availability to do it the right way and you're not gonna be super under the gun, but rip that bandaid off. The goal should be to learn. The goal should not be to get it perfect on the first try. Third common theme. This is actually the thing that was most brought up in regards to hiring on the intake forms was onshore versus offshore. Should I be hiring a person that is in the US or a person that is not in the US? Now, one thing to clarify, the offshore conversation still gets very tangled up with outsourcing. Outsourcing and offshoring are two different things. Generally, outsourcing is thought of as buying, you know, a month-end close, buying a tax return, something like that. There's another group of human beings somewhere else in the world. They can be onshore, they can be offshore, they can be nearshore, but they are producing the work product. They're making the widgets that you sell. And so what you're paying them for is actually a month-end close. You don't manage the people directly. You can speak into how they do the work, but they're not your people as opposed to simply hiring people offshore and they're just another employee of yours. Not in the, not in the legal sense, but they're a person who you have 100% of their time and attention. It's your responsibility to train them. They're just another part of the squad. And as our teams go more distributed, I mean, this got way easier. Like COVID accelerated remote work in a way that I think massively accelerated the globalization of work. 'Cause it's like, oh, I realized I can work with Jim from across town. So it actually doesn't matter if Jim's across town or on the other side of the world. If Jim can do the work, then great. There, um, consistently when people get into offshoring for the first time and that mystique kind of goes away, I think on the other side of that, once it has kind of been normalized, it's easier to make a decision of just like, it doesn't really matter all that much if it's onshore, if it's offshore. In some situations, maybe I won't make them client-facing, but then you're just, you're putting together the puzzle pieces of the different parts of your team. Based on— it's like yet another skill set that you could go out and find. Like, there is no ceiling on technical capability for offshore folks. You can hire people out of Big Four in the Philippines. The bottleneck for most is, are you going to make them client-facing? And so it is a different— it is a different type of person that you plug into your ecosystem because of that restriction. I say that not all firms are that way. There are firms that have folks in the Philippines, for example, who are client-facing. But in my case, because I didn't make them client-facing, It just changed how I build my teams a little bit, changed how I built my pods. It meant my onshore folks, there was a greater emphasis of them managing, on them managing the client relationship. But to bring this back to the difficulty of finding people, you can find someone offshore and give, like, give them an offer in the next 48 hours. I mean, there's advertisers on this podcast that make that trivial. You can interview them, you can do a trial day with them. This is not like you don't know if they can do the work. You know that they can do the work just as much as you would know an onshore person can or cannot do, do the work. You could have an offer out in the next 48 hours. How are you gonna do that onshore? And so for me, I ended up hiring, I ended up with, you know, maybe 2 onshore folks for every 1 onshore person was kind of what we were trending towards. It started 1 to 1, but then was skewing more 2 to 1. And my onshore team went from being very scared of that to absolutely loving it because the people we were hiring were tremendous. And it was able to, it helps to unblock my onshore team and get them into the more higher value stuff, like the more sort of ambitious engagement management sort of things that we'd been talking about. I mean, we do an annual review with team members and be like, hey, here's the more ambitious things we want you to grow into. And what we ran into was we would get there the next year and be like, hey, why didn't you get to these things? And they're like, I'm doing all the same tasks. Where are these tasks supposed to go? I don't have anybody I can give them to. This all got unblocked for the most part by offshore hiring for us because we could go out and within 30 days have a really good person in a way that we simply couldn't guarantee hiring onshore. Now there's ways to, uh, increase the likelihood and improve your odds onshore, mainly paying for recruiters, building your network and all of that. But offshoring, I mean, there is a certain inevitability to the globalization of work, kind of like AI, I think. and depending on the type of work that you do, you might have to make disclosures to clients, but that's a reason to disclose, not a reason to not hire offshore. It is one of those things where like if you choose not to do it, you are competing against people who are choosing to do it. And so it's a wedge that is kind of just disappearing, not unlike Cloud Cowork. If I can use Cloud Cowork to get the same work done more efficiently, but there's another firm that's get— that are like never AIers and they're like, we'll never touch this stuff. That's just a harder, inherently harder business to build. Quick word from one of this episode's sponsors. If you are getting, uh, warmer to the idea of offshore staffing, as many accounting firms are, something that I did in my own firm and had tremendous luck with it, wouldn't it be nice if you had someone you could trust to go out and find you the right person? You just pay them a flat fee to find you a great hire, like no middleman, no ongoing charges. Wouldn't that be be nice. If you're looking for that person, look no further, look no further than TeamUp. TeamUp, run by actually a former bookkeeping firm owner who had tremendous success hiring folks in the Philippines, hired some local recruiters there. Now all they do is help place awesome accountants, be it, uh, bookkeepers, tax pros, virtual assistants. They source awesome local talent in the Philippines and they connect them with you. If you are into the direct hiring route, when it comes to building an offshore team, that's TeamUp's sweet spot. They find you really good candidates. You hop on the interview and you don't move forward until you've got somebody that you're absolutely stoked to have them come and work with your accounting firm. If that's you, if you need some, some humans to augment your AIs, get on the horn with TeamUp. More information down in the show notes. Tax firms are up to their eyeballs in 1040 work right now. You really are. Everybody is sending you all these documents and you're doing the old hokey pokey of like, ah, what do I need? What do I have? Uh, you never sent me number 3, 7, and 9. AI gang can automate honestly all of this at this point. This episode's sponsor, Sorban. They've been at the top of my recommendations for tax workflow since they launched, and they're using AI as effectively as anybody to take the pain out of 1040 work. And as you know, listening to this podcast, it has never been more important than it is right now to make sure that we are making the most of these unbelievably good new AI models. Your clients don't get value from the document gathering process. In fact, it gets away, away from like the, the stuff that you actually want to be doing, right? It devalues what you do if they see you as this just document sort of admin gatherer. Software has solved for this. It really, really has. To check out how Sorban is now using AI not only to automate 1040 intake, but also automate the input into your tax software and, and the the delivery of the tax return. Check out the link down in the show notes. Super cool product. All right. Issue number 4 that feeds into sort of this feeling of, of it being impossible to hire. A ton of people brought this one up. They need an assistant. They say they need an assistant, but they don't have one. Hiring an assistant in order to help me get out of the weeds. I've struggled to keep an assistant to support me in the past year. Hiring an office admin and figuring out next year's pricing. Potentially hiring a part-time admin to make sure that there's time for client work and bringing in new clients. A lot of folks are stuck on what does a quote unquote admin mean inside of an accounting firm? Let me give you 3 flavors of accounting firm admins. Number 1 is a virtual assistant. This is very often a fractional role. They may work with other companies as well. The upside here is that's an easy thing to ease into because you don't have 100% of their time. They're handling email triage, they're handling scheduling, basic document organization, following up with clients. Super cheap. You can start using one at like 10 hours a week. Second flavor, an executive assistant that is like dedicated just for you. This person, uh, in a more hands-on way, runs your calendar, usually manages your inbox, is doing more proactive communication. Their job is to save your time and attention. And boy, don't we all need that? Like, that's literally their job is to protect you and your time and your attention. And the reason most of us don't do it is they're like, oh, an assistant? Am I really that person? Rather, if you are at capacity, you probably are. What would you say? What would you say if somebody asked your kids or somebody asked your employees, would you like more time with Daddy? Almost all of them would be like, that would actually be lovely if you could be a little more hands-on with training and soccer practice. That is the assistant's job. Third flavor of admin is an ops manager. This is someone that's working more directly with your team, managing processes, talking with staff. It's a little bit more of a senior person. They don't have to be an accountant. They're responsible for some of the execution of the stuff that you want to do. But those are all 3 very different roles that all fall under the admin bucket. A VA, an executive assistant, and an ops manager. You probably don't want to hand off like the direct client communication. You don't want to hand off the pricing stuff, more the strategy. What you're trying to hand off is execution of your plan and triage, digging yourself out from just the muck of the day-to-day. Okay, force number 5 that is factoring into hiring being impossible. Training new hires when you don't have the time to do so. Most of us make the hiring decision when we are up to our EYE balls, eyeballs. And when you are, when you are overcapacity, there is not then more capacity which you can then use to onboard a person. It is like trying to change a tire on a car that's rolling downhill. It is one of those things, onboarding, that is just— would take more time than you think it will to do it right, which is how all things in life are. And that's frustrating. But I will say you can build onboarding in a durable way where it doesn't feel ephemeral. Like, you can build resources for your employee onboarding process that the next person can follow. And so it, it can be institutionalized a bit and can become an asset. So you're not reinventing the wheel every single time. Um, obviously timing matters here a lot. You can't do this during busy season. This is actually a great time right now to be doing this. I would say AI also really helps here. Oftentimes we struggle with giving team members stuff to do and being able to keep them busy. AI is very, very good at being able to create practice projects like dummy datasets so that if someone's not at 100% capacity, you can have this library of projects that they could work through. So it is as if they are working and as if they are getting in the repetitions so that when you do have more work for them to do, they are not figuring stuff out in the live environment, breaking stuff on an actual client file. This is also something that there are people like really gifted at doing well. Like if there's someone on your team, you may have this person, if you run a team, who is really into making that person feel welcome and answering all their questions and making them feel supported on day one. You might feel like this is your job because you're the big boss and it's something that just you have to do. But this is a great opportunity to give some responsibility to somebody else in the team because some folks They are just built to love this sort of thing. And if that's not you, there's, there's only, you can only fake it so much. It is great. I mean, there's like a bunch of ways you can do this, but when somebody starts out, like they need to have a buddy that's not the boss because everyone's afraid of pestering the boss and looking dumb, giving them a buddy that feels like more of a peer. They've got an outlet for those questions. You better believe you're going to be doing the old end around with that peer, right? And be like, hey, how are things going? Does it seem like they're a murderer? But onboarding done well takes a lot of time, but is a process that can be systematized. Just, just don't try to walk into it when it's too late because that's a just a disaster waiting to happen. Number 6, people who are looking for quality, not just more bodies. Need to find staff with leadership/client management skills. Need to find more talented folks who can execute on the major initiatives and new technologies. More talent that understands the nuances of accounting and cross-sections with techs— with tech. That was a sentence. Hiring for culture, ensuring each additional person fits into the vibe. Modern philosopher Alex Hormozi. If you're— if you've been on the internet, you've almost certainly seen him. They are ramping up their offerings for professional services firms. And if you scroll Instagram, you might have even gotten ads from him where there's certain types of firms they'll work with directly and do coaching and all of that. And they talk about there being two sides to your accounting firm. Most accounting firms are staffing blocked, which is actually very unique. Most businesses, that's not the issue. Like they're focused on getting more leads and better leads and all that. And most accountants are like, brother, I got leads coming out of my ears. I just need more warm bodies that'll do the work. On this podcast here, we talk more about with the, with the talent that I have, what's the most efficient, most profitable business that I can run? That's more my take. But Hormozy's take on this is there's basically two sides of the business. There's the side that most people are investing in and other types of business that is lead acquisition and all that. Most accounting firms, they don't have to put that much effort into that. They need to invest in the other side, which is basically lead acquisition for your next hire. And so if you think about the efforts you go through to attract clients, which I know frankly for most of us, it's not a lot. You got a website, you made a couple of people happy and they sent a couple other people. But even just the website, what percentage of that website is for attracting clients versus attracting the next great member of your team? And what do you need more right now? Clients or your next hire. Like, we're not building an acquisition funnel for talent, and that might look different than an acquisition funnel for finding clients. But the solution to both is being in the world, being visible, not being professionally invisible. And so the hard truth here, if I could punch you in the oof bone, is I can't find good people usually means I haven't made my firm worth joining. What makes you different? On your About Us page or your careers page or something like that, is that page the equivalent of the Peace of Mind landing page? Like, what are you doing different? What makes you better? If you can't put it into words, I would argue you may not be better. Did I just say argue? Don't worry about it. If the only thing that's going to keep them there are these mysterious aspects of it being a great place to work that you just find out once you start working there, then how is that going to attract the next person? You can be a great place to work in a way that only the employees really understand, but that doesn't get people in the door, right? So how can we be great for a specific type of person, attractive for a specific type of accountant? Oftentimes the solution is actually to follow on the specificity for your clients. If I want to work with taxidermists or firearm manufacturers or egg What— I don't know what they call those people that sell eggs. If I'm serving a very specific type of client, the best type of accountant to come to work for you is the one that's passionate about the same thing. Imagine that passion coming through their conversations with clients. And we, we probably have the same fear that we do on the client side of like, well, if we're getting this specific, it's gonna be a smaller hiring pool. It is a smaller hiring pool in a big, vast universe though. And oftentimes that specificity, it makes it easier to find the right person, which is who you're looking for after all. Your ambitions have to be big enough to fit other people's dreams within them. And so if somebody else can't look at what you're doing and be like, yes, brother, I wanna be a part of that. Don't expect 'em to. And so if you stand outside the building and you look at your accounting firm right now, you look at the website right now and you don't see something there that's like, wow, that's unique. Then don't expect anybody else to. Right? Be one of one. Let that freak flag fly. Be a great place to work for a specific type of person. 3 more to go. Number 7, the capacity/revenue chicken and egg. I'm stuck on having enough capacity to do the work, but also having enough revenue to pay for the team. There's too much to do right now and I can't afford the help. Some hard truth on this one is oftentimes this sounds a little like I want to grow without changing. I want to be able to continue doing the same thing, but then have someone else magically step in to do it. But if you can't afford that next person, It means something's got to change in the system to make that happen right now. The goal with hiring ought to be on the other side of this. I have to be able to do less work and make the same money so that I then have the option. If I want to, I can work more, I can work the same amount, and then the company's making more money. But there's a lot of folks that are stuck on making the next hire because it will make profit go down because as soon as you hire them, you have to start paying them. Yeah, that— what? Yeah, of course. No, of course you do. But you wouldn't hire them unless there was ROI there, unless that was going to pay off. And the tricky calculus for people is usually that is eating into your time, right? Instead of you doing it all and that being quote unquote free, we got to pay somebody else to do that. So it probably means I'm going backwards. Most accounting firms, if you look at their profitability, it is this zigzaggy thing. Even when you're beyond like, you know, your next hire being a big deal. We've talked with Chad Davis, whose firm has just done massive zigzags to over 100 people. To, you know, 50 people. There is a cycle of making an investment, taking a hit, and coming out on the other side and being like, are we in a better place right now or not? The solution here, it is usually trimming the fat, cutting the bottom 10-20% of clients, raising prices like you probably know that you should. All of a sudden you got some time back, you got some money back, and if you want, you can hire. But you might also get there and be like, oh, this actually isn't that bad. I'm actually working a couple few, a couple hours less a day, making the same money. This is actually pretty chill. That's not what most people do, though. What most people do is they just keep bolting humans onto the machine as a Band-Aid for the fundamental problem that is this work is not profitable enough. Well, if I can get paid for this and I'm at capacity, I'll just hire another human being and they will go do that work and it'll just print money. Win-win. I worked with dentists a lot. Biggest mistake a single office dentist would make is they would hit capacity and be like, I got to hire an associate. I got to get another doc in here to, to, to see more patients. I'm going to pay them 40% of collections is what they all say. How can I not make money on this? They finally find an associate. They bring this person in. They usually drive them insane. All the assistants are like, this person does work a totally different type of way. Like they're ticking off the patients because this person doesn't have the same, like, level of investment in keeping people happy. Also turns out can't make any money paying somebody 40% of collections. I can't tell you how many docs I had this conversation with and docs that would go out and like hire 3 or 4 and they would start at $40,000 and then go down to $35,000 and then go down to $30,000 and get to the end of this and being like, I'm not making any more money, but now I'm managing all of these annoying associates that just want to haggle over how much they're getting paid. There's a version of this that we do inside of accounting firms where we're like, no, I don't need to cut those legacy clients. I just haven't found the right accountant to service them. And then you hire that person and then those legacy accountants still just want to talk to you. And before you know it, like half of your business isn't making money. I shared in our, in our firm, an 80-year-old firm that I bought, how basically it was something like 70% of the client headcount accounted for 10% of the revenue. All these itty-bitty projects, friends of kind of old partners, all these folks that we were dragging for because nobody had the stones to ever get rid of them, that were this humongous drain on not only our time but our mental bandwidth. Our resources. Imagine that 70% of your headcount accounting for 10% of the revenue. The phone calls that we would get in the office every day, how many of those phone calls were just like trivial in the overall scale of the business when 70% of the headcount is 10% of the revenue? The solution is not hiring another person. That, frankly, that's decades of, of the firm using that as the solution. No, we don't need to let those clients go. We just need to hire another person. But that doesn't solve the problem, right? That becomes, that becomes a shop that you don't want to run. Whole bunch of people, whole bunch of problems. The solution, as it is with most things, how do I find the next client that'll happily pay me a little bit more? Then I will have the option of paying someone or hiring a higher level person because I can finally afford them now. Or I can keep doing my thing, making more money in less time. To the goat number 8, succession, retiring partners, knowledge transfer, granddad. We're about to send them out to pasture. One note on this, because I keep— I can't tell you how often I get this question of accountants who go into this ambiguous deal with a transitioning owner that's like, yeah, I'm going to leave. And you're like, yeah, but when? And they're like, I don't know. I don't— what? Probably soon. I don't know. Sometime. And this is made 5 times worse when this is a generational firm and that might actually be granddad, because then it's even harder to kick them out. But if you're entering into this, especially if you are turning away other opportunity, entering into an agreement like this where you may be stepping into owning a firm that's like not even a very modern firm or very attractive firm, you need to know how long they will be around. I have seen too many people who have nowhere else to go and ultimately decide to never leave. So if you're in the process of, of this like sort of partner that is retiring Sometime soon, lock that stuff down. Doesn't mean that it can't be locked down with some flexibility. You just gotta kind of protect your own interests here and ensure that there is at least some sort of timeline. Biggest thing here is relationship transition. Just having some overlap anytime they're having meetings with clients, uh, uh, meeting recorders. If you can get them to do virtual, like, uh, Zoom meetings, meeting recorders are a tremendous help here cuz you're starting to document what those communications look like. A lot of firms, they will think they need to hire somebody new to step into this, to step into taking over these clients. That's really tricky. That's, that's harder than it seems because you have a new person coming in with no institutional knowledge that won't know how that person normally works. And they're also like the riskiest person in the business to put those clients onto because they just got there. You don't know them that well. And those are always the most likely people to flame out. And so if you put those, those client relationships onto that person you just brought in, you run the risk of that person then leaving. And now these clients are like, okay, I can see you tried to, you tried to transition me off of Bob, but now Jimmy's gone too. Now you're sending me to Carly. Like, this is, I don't, this is a lot. On relationships, this is a reason why I had sort of pods that were responsible for managing the relationship. There is risk in there ever being a single person that manages that client, because if they go do something else, if they leave, then 100% of the client's connection with the firm goes away. I think it is worthwhile to diffuse some of that connection across at least two people so that there's not just a single person that they go to for everything. We talked about the client concierge model where there's like a single sort of person on your team that is responsible for sort of advocating for the client within your firm. I do think it's still okay to have that person, but the client is then operating with the knowledge that that person is not the one doing all of the work. And so they still, from time to time, like with the concierge, will meet with the tax manager or something like that. So they have some other connections. But if you don't use that concierge model and you have the person who's doing production meeting with the client, don't let just a single person do that. I would say get 2 people involved on that, even if it's like a junior, senior, because it de-risks then any sort of turnover in your team that could complicate that relationship. So even in the context of phasing out a partner, they don't just need to meet one other person. If that client is then connected with one other person, you're kind of back to the same problem where that, that client is only there because of that one individual in your firm. You still kind of got that single point of failure. For me, that whole team and pod-based approach also is what allowed me to buy out several partners and transition to a more traditional org chart structure. So we went from 5 to 6 partners down to really like 2 co-owners and a more traditional org chart. Hey, real quick, month-end close automation software. It has kind of completely changed what doing bookkeeping work looks like the last few years. And did you hear the news recently that this episode's sponsor Canopy, they are working on their own spin on month-end close automation that is coming soon and will be built directly into the Canopy platform. Canopy, who you may have seen late last year launched their own version of like tax intake built into the practice management system. Now they're going after month-end close automation and it is all, it is all part of Canopy's vision to be the single sort of all-in-one place to not only manage the work of your accounting firm, but to get that stuff done. I almost cursed. You know what I'm saying? Canopy always kind of been like a feature nerd's dream, especially if you are of the mind where you're like, man, I want to consolidate more of my stuff, eliminate some tools you're leaning maybe more all-in-one. Canopy has been one of my leaders in the practice management system category for as long as my recommendations have existed. Excited to see what they're doing in the bookkeeping automation space now as well. But to learn more about Canopy, check out the link down in the show notes. Spring is here. It is spring cleaning season, the perfect time to clean out the dusty corners of your accounting firm and just get rid of the stuff that you don't want to be doing still. And for most of us, one of those cobweb-laden services that is just stuffed into the corner of the garage, it is bill pay. Well, good news, my friends. Artificial intelligence is here to help. You might have heard of it. The platform that's crushing it right now? This video's sponsor, Maker's Hub. Listen, nobody likes bill pay, okay? It sucks, but almost every business has to do it, and oftentimes it's high stakes, it's messy, it impacts inventory you're going after, like savings. The details matter. You miss a zero or a comma here or there, oh my, oh my, oh my Oh my gosh, that's a big deal on bill pay, right? We are getting wildly good new AI models seemingly by the week right now. And honestly, Maker's Hub are the folks that I trust to like put this work. Maker's Hub have been like arguably making the best use of AI models over the last 3 years to solve a very, very specific problem. The problem of bill pay. Nobody likes it. So if you do this stuff for your clients or you have clients who deal with project tracking, seaming, like construction people and manufacturing folk, HVACsmans. Super recommend you check out Maker's Hub, a great example of AI done well. To learn more, check out the link down in the show notes. Last one, number 9. What's feeding into hiring being impossible is that the owner is the bottleneck, is that everything is sitting on your desk and everybody's waiting for you to make a decision or this or that. Let me give you 3 different types of bottlenecks. Number 1 is the knowledge Bottleneck. You're the only one capable enough to do the work that you're selling. Sometimes this is real. You're the only technical expert. Other times it's a lack of documentation. No one else is privy to the information required to be able to do the work. That is the knowledge bottleneck. Second is the decision bottleneck. Nobody else has permission to hit the launch button. Anytime something has to be decided, they all come to you. They all defer to you. At no point do you say, what's your opinion? "Hey, Jason, why don't you both come up with your, you know, 3 options and your recommendation?" Don't just come to me with a question. Come to me with options and a recommendation. At some point, you have to start distributing the decision-making across the rest of your team. Third type of bottleneck, the relationship bottleneck. Clients are loyal to you. They think you walk on water. And even if you do, I mean, that's part of the problem is sometimes you've built a team around yourself where you are the one water walker. But very quickly, you become the victim of that because the client needs anything. They're not going to deal with anybody on your snot-nosed team. Not when you're as good as you are. I made the same mistake. It's hard not to build the business around your own, your own strengths. What makes you a special snowflake? But the more fun business to run is the one where your clients can be served by the people who work for you, not just you. And that requires divorcing yourself of the notion that we need to be on every sales call, every onboarding. Anytime a hard thing comes up, that has to go through us. If you volunteer that, that becomes the expectation of not only your team, but also the client. And so you can't then also like pity yourself when you are buried under the weight of your own excellence. What's that movie? The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent. Oh, such a good movie. Listen to me, look me in the eyes. Hiring, it's not impossible. People are doing it all over the place. You have to think of yourself as a lighthouse for a specific type of person. Do you know who that person is yet? Who is the right vibe, the right energy, the right type of person to come and work with your firm? And what reliable mechanism do you have to let the outside world know that you exist? The internet is, is wild in the way that it has connected people from all over the world, and it just blows your mind how many people there are, how many nuanced problems are out there. And reminds us with the tools we have available to us today, we are tapping into so little of what is possible with how connected the world is. And the great news is you are scarce. Accountants are so in demand. You are so rare. Think of the stupid effective hourly rate that people will pay for your expertise. That means anything we can do to go out there and be of service to people is so appreciated because your skill set is so rare. So like, get out there, help people, be visible, talk about what you do, be confident in who you're great for, be that lighthouse for your firm and people will find you. That is what I am at the end of the day and is what I am in the business of doing is I'm a lighthouse for folks who are of a certain mind about how to run an accounting firm. And the best thing I can offer you is connection with other people who are like-minded in that way. That's why my only business really is Realize the private community is these live events where you can get 105 people out in Seattle who listen to the podcast and they're all accounting firm people. And you're like, I have never met another person in my life that listens to the podcast, and I'm now in a room of 100 of them that live in the same town as me. That's pretty wild. That's a vibe. But that is kind of what, like, the digital age has enabled is we are all hyperconnected if we let ourselves be. And it sort of changes the strategy from outbound going after these things to simply showing up and being there every single day and talking about what you're doing and then attracting what your business needs. But I recognize doesn't come natural for most of us. Gang, we got to keep this train moving. Let's get to the mailbag. Mailbag, mailbag, mailbag, mailbag. This segment is called Mailbag. Mailbag. Questions today come from all sorts of sources. We actually got quite a few. We got quite a few, uh, from text message that we're going through today. My number, 1-516-980-4968. When I put out the call the other day to call that number and listen to my voicemail message, boy, did a lot of you people do that. If you haven't yet, it may be the best voicemail message you've ever heard. Just call the number. But we collect questions from YouTube comments, from my email, social media DM, everywhere. We pull them all together here so that we can learn and enrich ourselves all together. Okay. First up, thoughts on OpenAI's new cloud cowork competitor. This is big news. Have you heard the news? Kind of went under the radar. So OpenAI, OpenAI, the closest thing they have to a cloud cowork is called Codex. And originally this was their version of Cloud Code, like a platform for writing code and managing software and all that stuff. But Codex has since, I would argue, been sort of normified. It is a little bit codey, developer-leaning still, but has also gotten pretty accessible. Whereas what Claude did, they have Claude Code for developers and they have Claude Cowork for, for muggles. OpenAI, or sorry, Codex is kind of both of those things. And what they just launched at the end of last week is the ability of the Codex desktop app, the thing that runs on your local computer, to, uh, tippy-tap on your keyboard, move your cursor around, use any app on your computer. That's right, pretty spook, right? Now, Claude Cowork only launched that ability like a month ago. Now Codex can do the same. You can use it like an AI assistant, but it can also get stuck and be like, hmm, what applications does your computer have that I could maybe solve this problem with. Now, right now only works on Mac because all of these things frankly get developed for Mac first and then PC second. And I know that is anti-accountant. Don't you know the business world, it runs on the personal computer? These days it is just as easy to run an accounting firm on a Mac as it is on PC, if not easier. All of the legacy applications that we use and desktop apps at this point are largely legacy applications, old stuff. Even PC users are running their legacy apps as hosted apps. Like, do we realize this? Unless you have a local server, which these days, probably not even advisable, unless you have a local server, you are running your old school desktop apps as hosted apps, which means if you're on a Mac, it would look the exact same. That hosted app, it would, it would be the identical hosted app on your Mac. So really these days for running an accounting firm, not much difference between using a PC or a Mac, but anyways. Codex, they released this update for the Mac desktop app. And you know what? Nobody gave a hoot. It came out and you may not have even heard about it, which is wild to think that now there's basically a desktop app from ChatGPT that can control anything on your computer. Woo! If somebody had told us that 6 months ago, we'd be like, I'm very excited, I'm very scared, but I could see how that's probably going to impact my work. In the end, this is good news. This is like what we want is OpenAI continuing to invest in this stuff. But this is something that is now kind of months old for, for Claude Cowork and Claude Cowork continues to release stuff at just a shocking rate of speed. And so at this point, ChatGPT still feels quite a ways behind. And so I'm not all that interested in talking about Codex or putting out content about it for now. We went years where I told people, just ChatGPT, because ChatGPT was always the very best or very near the very best for years on end. And I encourage people, don't jump back and forth between things because the answer next week is going to be totally different. The last 3 months, honestly, we've made that full transition to Claude. And right now Claude is pretty clearly the leader by a big margin. And so I'm not really like jumping at every little update from the other players because they have such a lead. I would say this is the first time since ChatGPT's launch, uh, about 27 years ago. How long ago was that? This is the first time I've actually told people switch. Like Claude is, it is just fundamentally better and they've got a humongous lead at this point. Again, that can change, but there's only so much flip-flopping we can do, right? So I wouldn't be telling you to go to Claude unless I, like, if I didn't have great confidence that they have a durable lead at the moment. And this Codex update, while it's cool, It's kind of a bummer that it's not a bigger deal. But we are cranking on all sorts of coworks stuff right now because that's a big deal. I mean, it's— it may be the biggest deal ever in accounting firm tech, Claude Cowork. I mean, imagine the notion of having this black box where you just chuck all this stuff in and it just knows how to do this with no specialized knowledge. So many software companies are shaking in their boots. I put out a meme the other day, the number of software folks who are like, you need to use my specialized tool for this job because it is a special AI. It is an AI tuned just for this specific function, and so it will perform better than Cloud Cowork. Yet that person, they built that thing with Cloud Cowork. So at a certain point, do you want to be the one doing cool stuff with Cloud Cowork, or do you want to be the one consuming stuff from other people's Cloud Coworks? The choice is yours. Okay, next question: do you feel your app recommendations are the same when it comes to bigger firms like ours? We have over 100 accountants in multiple offices in states and provide services that range from tax and advisory to assurance and business process outsourcing. My app recommendations. The only part of them that is size dependent is the practice management system. Certain PMs of all PMs are optimized for a certain size of firm. And so right now, the only PMs you should be looking at if you're at 100 employees or beyond, it is Canopy, it's Karbonn, and it's Qount spelled with a Q. Good luck. Not even you after that queue. All the other app recommendations from month-end close automation to tax workflow automation, not really size dependent at all. In fact, the vast majority of my leaders, uh, like the highest category in my app recommendations, are used pretty heavily by top 100 firms. So only thing to look out for if you are a bigger firm, practice management system impacts that. Otherwise, take those app recommendations and go wild. Actually, speaking of going wild, My app recommendations, which is a, a, a big old Google Sheet with a whole bunch of tabs. Download that thing to an Excel file, put it into your Claude Cowork. You wouldn't believe the cool stuff that it can do with that. I'm, uh, in a couple weeks I'm hosting a, basically a founder's dinner in New York for a whole bunch of the, the tech founders in the accounting firm space. I put that whole app recommendation database in there, about 150 companies. I said, go through the companies here. Find me the founders who are in New York or around New York. In about 90 seconds, it came back having found the founders of every single one of those companies. And then I said, expand upon this list, like find 150 more companies that are similar to these that serve accounting firms and give me any New York, New York founders there. It's so good. Like, I almost don't give it enough credit to trust it to do that sort of volume of work because a human, that would knock out an afternoon. But find creative uses for that app recommendation database. For my YouTube videos, like right now, I will just chuck a link to one of my YouTube videos or podcasts into Claude and be like, find the reference to XYZ, or what did I say about this or that? And it will go out and it'll find a tool to get a transcript of the video. And it like, it just does all that stuff magically for you. I find myself not giving it enough credit and being like, it can't actually do that. And then you throw it in and it's like, it did that, but I don't really know how. Pretty wild. Next up, Jason, do you still recommend Assembly, formerly Copilot, for a client portal? I don't see it in your spreadsheet. If not, why not? The truth is Assembly is one of those tools that sort of defies categorization, and that is a really tricky thing with my app recommendations is to make it easier for you. All the apps are organized into categories like practice management, month-end close automation, and proposals, stuff like that. But all these apps are like doing all of those things now in some form or another. So what category do you put them in? It defeats the purpose of categories if you put them into every category. And then you have a tool like Assembly where all it does is client portal, but in this really cool, novel, flexible way. What category do I even put that in? Because I couldn't have a category that's client portal. Otherwise, like literally every single app in the accounting firm ecosystem would go into that category. So I still love Assembly. I talk to them quite a bit. Actually, the founder is going to be at that dinner that I just mentioned. Why is it not an app recommendation spreadsheet? I'd probably just need like a junk drawer, like a, a other category where I can just chuck a whole bunch of stuff that defies categorization. Like, you know, Write Tool, Write Tool. You can't put Write Tool into a category. So it's pro— I just probably didn't need to improve upon the app recommendations. Hey, just real quick, if you're using Outlook or Gmail to manage email inside of your accounting firm, Brother, those were tools that were built, uh, 20+ years ago and not for accounting firms like yours. If you haven't heard of them, let me introduce you to one of today's sponsors, Missive. Missive, M-I-S-S-I-V-E. It is exactly what I needed. I, I actually used a bunch of like off-the-shelf help desk sort of email tools in my accounting firm. Man, man, do I wish I had Missive. It's a vastly more efficient way to manage email across your entire team. Because email is not a hill that anybody should be dying on alone. We did a demo on the main channel of it. If you want to see it in action, just search my name and Missive. Really cool. Doing some cool AI stuff as well. Worth checking out to learn more about just what you're missing by using Outlook or Gmail. Check out the Missive info down in the show notes. Hey, real quick, do you need to hire any humans inside of your accounting firm? I wish you could see what I'm seeing through my own two eyes right now. I'm staring at a portal of qualified pre- 3 vetted candidates that are champing at the bit to come and work for your accounting firm. These are real human beings. Aubrey, a bookkeeper with 3 years experience, $3,100 a month. Samuel, an executive assistant with almost 10 years experience, $3,000 a month. Maycol, a bookkeeper with 6 years experience. He's got a CPA experience with, with Bill.com, Accounting CS, Deal, Power BI, QBO, NetSuite. Let's find a tax person. Mia, US tax accountant. Experience with CCH Access, Drake, and Ultratax. Oh, bless her heart. $4,000 a month. Gang, these are all super talented accountants that are ready to come and work with your firm through Cloud Accountant Staffing, longtime sponsor of the channel. They have a portal where you can go around and see all the folks that they have pre-vetted and even book an interview directly with those people from the portal. You don't even have to hop on a call with Cloud Accountant Staffing. All these applicants have— they've got resumes, they've got intro videos. Can't tell you how many firms that I know who have been very happy with Cloud Accountant Staffing. Accounting, it is a universal language. Luca Pacioli, buckle up for this one. Not American, Italian. You know why? Because accounting knows no borders. Here accounting, there accounting, everywhere accounting, accounting. Okay, you need some human talent in your accounting firm? Talk with Cloud Accountant Staffing. Check out the link down in the show notes. Next comment: I resent the knitting comments. I resent the knitting. Did I say something about knitting? I just said I use Claude for this now. We have the, hang on, we have the AI for this. I'm gonna go to Claude. I'm gonna say, this is actually what I'm gonna do right now. I will link it the YouTube channel for my podcast and say, go back through the last couple weeks episodes. When did I mention knitting? I did this earlier this morning. Okay. Found it a couple episodes ago. Here's what I said. If you're going to spend time on why, I mean, like nobody's going to pay you for that. Like this is the bi— oh no. Like that's like the business version of knitting. Where are we going here? I know you're spending a lot of time on it. At least with knitting, the outcome is something itchy that you can give to someone that they'll never use. Oh, we just made a lot of people mad. Yeah, that was a low blow, wasn't it? Listen, I think the point was, don't run a business intentionally on borrowed time, which I feel like never AIers are doing. They're taking the high ground. They're being like, I'm not using AI. I was like, okay, well, it's totally up to you. You can do that. Just recognize you're doing it alongside a whole bunch of other people that are. So that's just going to be a tough business to run. Just like spending all of your time knitting. Is that knitting? Is it making you a better person? Is it fueling the fires of capitalism? It isn't. You know what? It isn't. And that's probably exactly why we all need to do a little more knitting. I went after knitters and that was probably inappropriate. If you've been around here long, you know that I enjoy being very opinionated about things that are not worth having an opinion about, and that is what makes them fun. I'm trying to beef up the tech of my firm and want to get ahead on AI. I just bought a computer for OpenClaw. Nice. And know that it's just not ready yet to give it the reins of my firm. It sure isn't, but I want to develop the AI automation muscle anyway because I want to run with it ASAP. Anyway, my question: how can I get comfortable with OpenClaw, ideally with accounting firm automation at scale, without risking anything bad like OpenClaw buying a G-Wagon with my client's credit card to reduce taxes? That's a tremendous example. Here's the thing. OpenClaw almost certainly is not going to be the tool for that job. The horse that is winning this race by a mile is Claude, and they have almost shipped all of the features that made OpenClaw novel. It's interesting. OpenAI, when OpenClaw blew up, OpenAI got the guy that put together OpenClaw, they got him to come and work for OpenAI, gave him an absolute duffel bag full of cash and said, you're part of us now. Claude, they're like, hey, that's cool. We're just going to go systematically steal every cool and novel thing inside of OpenClaw. And now ship it inside of Claude Co-Work. Open Claude, it is, it's an open source thing and it's actually getting a ton of investment to, to be able to work securely. Like it's actually very thoughtfully designed in that way. But if you look at Claude, they make their money from enterprise, which is something ChatGPT didn't do. They went down the consumer route. Anthropic went down the enterprise route. That's why Anthropic's winning. 80% of their money comes from enterprise. And so they're doing things with a very security-first mindset. Taking a fundamentally insecure thing like a freewheeling AI agent and thinking, how can I deploy this inside of Nabisco? And so when it comes to our smaller firms, that's great. Like, I want the security big dogs really thinking through those big brain things that I'm not even considering so that when I get it in my humble little hole-in-the-wall dusty accounting firm shop, it's got all the security bells and whistles that I need. Now, that computer buying, that was not a waste. I am personally already running into situations where I actually want my Claude running on a different computer so it's not clogging up what I'm trying to do on my own computer. And believe it or not, Claude Cowork already supports this. So for example, Claude in Chrome, which is Cowork's ability to control a Chrome browser and do stuff on the web, you can have it run on a Chrome browser that is on any computer. In fact, um, if you try to open your Claude account on another computer and use Claude for Chrome, while there's an active Claude session on another computer, it will ask you to name what computer you're using right now. And then you can actually tell it, use Claude for Chrome on my home PC, on my work laptop, any machine where you have used that before. So for this person that just bought another computer, you can have it running that stuff on that other computer. And then if you think about things like computer use, which is giving Claude the ability to move the mouse and click the keyboard and stuff like that, this is currently only available on the consumer plans for Claude. It's not yet available on the business plans for Claude, but I imagine it's coming soon. If you think about— we talked about this in the last episode— if you think about how you could responsibly deploy something potentially that powerful, it's probably on a separate computer that only has certain things installed on it. If I'm going to give a computer to my 7-year-old boy who is very into soccer, fist fighting his little brother, and LEGO Ninjago. I'm not gonna give him a computer that's got everything on there. And we have to think of our AI agents similarly as these itty-bitty babies that we are, we are introducing to the world. At no, at no point, or at least we're very far from this, will you take the mainframe, you know, your machine, which is the admin machine and has access to as much as possible. That is the last place where you're gonna open the door and let an AI agent walk in and say, go wild, make my life easier. You're going to start much smaller than that. And so I think there probably still is an argument for standalone machines that have access to limited things, but it almost certainly won't be OpenClaw that wins this race. Next up, my firm is running Carbon, Carbon practice management system. If you're not familiar with it, we do CAS/bookkeeping. We're aiming to add tax in the near future. Should I get Double or should I use Ader? Great question. The app database says Double is the leader, but is the Ader integration with Carbon worth going with a less good solution to get the integration benefits? My take on this is almost always no. Integration is a smaller factor than we often think in choosing the right product. You want the right tool for the job, integrations aside. If two tools are otherwise equal, then yes, go the integration route. But integrations are really flexed when it comes to marketing, and we know how paper-thin integrations often are. An integration is not a reason to buy an inferior product. Cosigned every Thomson Reuters user. Now, Carbon bought Ader. Ader's doing like cool, like advanced reporting and some month-end close automation. I will say Ader is a little more reporting leaning than Double, who I would say started with month-end close automation and then got into reporting. And Double's reporting is pretty cool. But no, right now Double is vastly more popular than Ader for month-end close automation specifically. So I would say go with the better tool. Though Carbon probably doesn't want me to say that. They'd probably send you down the Ader path. It is worth testing. Like, Ader is cool. It's just a very different app from Dubl. They've also struggled with— they are still relatively new. They came up in Australia, New Zealand, and really only recently started building a team in the US, whereas Dubl has been in the US almost exclusively for their entire lives. So Ader's just earlier on the awareness journey, on the product building journey as well. But Double is a, is a much more popular solution for that right now. And in fairness, they've had, you know, 3 or 4 years longer to work on it than Aitor has at this stage. All very good people working on these products. Actually know all of them well. What I'm speaking to though is what are people using the most and what are people telling me that they love the most? In fact, the whole hiring section of this podcast, all that data was pulled together from the submissions folks made who came to my fall workshop series last year. One of the questions there is, what are the apps that you're in love with? Number one app, Double. My partner and I acquired an accounting firm in January with $1.5 million of sales, 1,300 clients, and 15 employees, about half seasonal, heavy tax focus, mainly individual clients. The firm is very antiquated. The entire process consists of moving a folder around the office from intake to prep to review to invoice. Love it. Bought an 80-year-old firm that did the same. After researching various app options, I'm going to implement TaxDome and Stanford Tax this summer. Great. Additionally, we're in the process of acquiring two other firms this summer, which we would like to bring on these systems as well. Bless your heart. Neither of them have a practice management system or tax workflow software. Any thoughts you have would be helpful. Uh, oh, oh, oh, you're getting yourself into quite the pickle there, bud. Bless your heart. You are fighting the good fight. Taking a paper firm and making it digital, that's a, that's a big lift. It will take longer than you think for your staff who's used to doing things on paper, oftentimes for decades, to be as efficient on digital. That will take years. The transition is a lot. And you say that you got two other firms you're buying this summer who are in the same situation. Oh, I could show you tens of people who tried to do this. And didn't, uh, because they ultimately said this was way more work, way more pushback, a lot harder of a lift than I thought it was. I would pump the brakes on the other acquisitions if it's me. $1.5 million firm, that's a big volume of work to change that fast. There's a world where you could try to do it, but just know that the cost might be a bunch of staff attrition. The cost might be client attrition because you're not able to like put the focus on the external relationship management because everything inside is on fire. I honestly, almost anyone you talk to who's done acquisitions like this would tell you the same. So give yourself some grace on the timing because that's a very aggressive plan. 3 more to go. I'm stuck on which software to use. I have a team of 8. We currently use Double for month-end close and QuickBooks Online. For receipts, we use a mixture of Double and Hubdoc. Now I'm really interested in Digits. I've used their reporting for a few years and I tried their GL about 8 months ago. They have added so much since then and I would like to try them again, but they don't integrate with Double. My question is, do I go from QBO plus Double to Digits or just stick with Double and QBO? First, I would say push Digits and Double to integrate. That would be lovely. So many firms would go Digits right now if Double would integrate with them, but test them each. If you're going to test it on any part of the business, carve out one segment, one specialization of the business, and commit to a single approach for that chunk, that hunk of the business. I know a good number of people now that exclusively use Digits, and it doesn't work for all types of accounting. It's just cash basis stuff. But like I did dental, that was really simple cash basis stuff. Digits would have been totally fine for that. We can all agree you would love to not have to stack up a bunch of apps. To like get to an efficient month-end close solution, right? Digits built a great solution for the problem that is QuickBooks Online. But if there was a ledger that would do all of that stuff and not necessitate all the hierarchy and all the three-layer cake of, of software that was necessary to feel like you can get that stuff done, we would all happily go to that alternative that didn't require the whole stack. Kind of a non-answer, I know, but the truth is like leading CAS firms now, like they're pretty much all on DoubleClick. What are your thoughts on AI potentially eliminating 1040 shops? That is like very simple tax prep shops. If they're going to come for anything, it's probably that 1040 shops. Now, 1040, you can have very simple 1040s, you can have very complex 1040s. The thing with AI, we just have to keep going upmarket. AI will make productized solutions. TurboTax, like the, the sort of software, like TaxPro as a software solution. All of those solutions will come upmarket. We have to also go upmarket to ensure that we're not serving the same people, and we need to get more specific in our expertise and the type of people that we serve. AI tools will be the ultimate generalists. Your job is to be more specific. I mean, if you— if all you did was pub trivia and that was how you made your living, now everybody's going to be like, wow, that guy that won Jeopardy, this ChatGPT thing over here, that's way smarter than him. What do we need him for? But you don't, you're an expert, you're a tax pro, you're an accounting pro. You have specific expertise. You can look at ChatGPT and be like, well, I'm smarter than it in this domain. We have to keep doing that because AI will continue to get better. We need to build, build more specific domain expertise and also like the network, the hub, like be the hub of other humans in that space because that will create opportunity even when we're not like punching in the numbers and doing all the classification and a lot more tax work and accounting work gets automated. Last one. I graduated last May from the University of Miami with a degree in finance and accounting. I'm working on getting my CPA. With that said, I would love to know if you think going to your event in Miami on May 11th would be worth it slash a good idea. Ultimately, I'd love to have my own firm one day, but that's a couple years down the road. Brother, that might be the best reason to come to the event, because if you show up, you will be surrounded by all of the coolest local firms there are. For somebody in your position that's just coming out of school, there is not another room in the world that is better for you than that room. I can't imagine if I was coming out of college to be able to go into a room of 60 other accounting firms that are all like trying to run cool progressive firms. They're all local. That is exactly the room that you need to be in. You're going to meet some amazing people because all of you that tune in, you're just good people, you know? And I don't, I don't just say that because you're still here at the end of an hour and 5-minute podcast. I say that because I've met so many of you out in the wild and I'm constantly amazed at how creative and like generous and sharp the folks are who are listening to this podcast and figuring out how to run a firm and have a family and navigate the AI stuff and do all these things. I've got a pretty great job and it is all made by the fact that y'all tune in and, uh, let me make fun of people that knit. Gang, great to see you today. Thanks for being here. I'll see you in the next one.