https://www.listennotes.com/e/3a824f91e6c74a829f99745afe9a90e8

Today it's Q and A Friday. One we're talking AI boogeyman stuff. Is there a place for wee bitty baby firms in an age of AI to how to measure and like track your accounting firm's progress throughout the year from all the stuff that you gotta get done to ensure you're where you need to be. And three, how to stand out in a busy niche. If you're thinking about going deeper, maybe specializing a bit, but you see some other people making hay over there already. What do you do about that? How do we make room for little old me? Come on in, let's talk about it. Okay, up first, boogeyman stuff. This comes from a question that I got from a listener. Here it is. I follow the channel. Appreciate all your content. My one question. Do you think running a solo firm will continue to be a viable option or do you think between Intuit and AI solo ownership will will be extinct in the future? I'd really appreciate it if you have time to answer the question. If not, I understand honestly, we don't have time. Let's move on. Nope, just kidding. We're already here. Let's answer it. The short answer is the requirement for you to stay relevant long term is the same as any firm whether you're a big or whether you're small. On the other side you're going to have buyers who have specific needs. Some of those needs are going to be served by humongous firms because maybe there's technical challenges like international stuff or something like that where the resources of a bigger firm can help. Obviously it comes with with a lot of trade offs. But there's also still going to be entrepreneurs out there who benefit from the more hands on approach of of small accounting firms. So if there was any timeline where this was especially problematic for small accounting firms, it probably wouldn't have anything to do with accounting as much as it would be the overall disruption of small business. Like you could see a world where you know somehow if AI makes running a micro business no longer possible and I don't, I have a hard time imagin but if it did and all he had left were like mid size and big companies, then that's probably what would disrupt the small accounting firm right now. There's always exceptions to this because the world is bigger and more nuanced and more complex than we're really aware of. We just kind of like see the surface sort of external stuff. We don't have a deep understanding of like every little nation and rock you can turn over to find people doing interesting things. But that's maybe the only scenario where running a small firm becomes problematic, or a solo firm especially. I do think it's worth understanding like where the kind of original fear along the lines of this most heavily impacting small firms and small businesses comes from. Because this, like the source of this narrative has changed. So historically the fear was I'm not going to have the ability to keep up with the big dogs because they have all these money, all this money and all these resources and they can train their own models and how am I ever going to compete with that? And this was the case five years ago. Like before we got probably GPT 3.5, maybe arguably even earlier, but GPT 3.5 was what ChatGPT was built on. And shortly after that model came out, the ChatGPT, like consumer app came out. And that was sort of generative AIs iPhone moment, if you will. But AI before that was really heckin expensive. In order to have an AI model that was good enough to do a specific job, it was tremendously expensive to like train your own model for a specific function. And you had to have access to all the data to train that model. And so that's where you look at a company, company like Intuit or Zero or who are all the people that have all the data. You look at those huge companies and you're like, well, they can spend $20 million to train an AI model. How is, how is anything I could build ever going to compete with that? Similarly, with accounting firms, you look at humongous firms, regional firms, big four firms, they still, they will still put out these big numbers to say, here's the amount of money we're investing in AI. And in the past you would have looked at that and been like, well, how can we compete with that? The really cool thing about this age of AI is that everybody's using the same models, is that the models that OpenAI is building and Google are building and you know, meta and all these different companies, they are so humongous and so powerful that it no longer makes sense for companies to go out and quote, train their own models. And so Intuit, for example, with very, very limited exceptions, they're by and large using the exact same models that you and I can have access to in ChatGPT or, or if you fancy yourself a bit of a coder like via the API. And so it's created this, this interesting thing where you've got a few companies and there's really only a few companies in the world. Anymore that have the resources to be able to build an AI model that is powerful enough. And every now and then you get disruptions to that like you know, the deep seq R1 model which was kind of controversially trained on much fewer resources. And so every now and then you'll, you'll get sort of breakthroughs and sort of different approaches to certain things. But by and large it's the FOL that have hundreds of millions of dollars to pour into training a model that are then that, that then are the beneficiaries of having these like uber powerful models that everyone else just uses rather than going out and training their own models. And some people even think there could be a scenario in the future where when an AI model gets to like this tipping, tipping point of being so capable that it can do sort of like general human level stuff which creates this exponential growth trajectory, then like once it gets to this tipping point of good enough, then the use cases are just like logarithmic, like exponentially bigger. There's some folks that say there's a timeline where whatever model or whatever company gets to that first, it's such a big opportunity that whoever gets there first, nobody else will ever be able to catch up because overnight the whole world runs on this AI model. And so you can see where that is. I mean that's tremendously problematic. I mean think about biases and what gets trained into the model and just how important that model thinks becomes to everything about society. You better hope that model doesn't get, you know, hungry. You want to understand, does it like cats or dogs better? Everything about it like kind of like shapes society in a really interesting, almost certainly problematic way. On the one hand you have the risk of that as AI has kind of been consolidated to the, the big folks that have all the money to train these models. On the other end of the spectrum, you and I have access to them. Back when into it was training their own models, we couldn't touch any of that stuff, right? And so that's kind of, that's the upside of this is it has democratized access to all this stuff. So the whole notion that the big dogs can do something that you can't do, that no longer is the case in my opinion. If anything, when you look at the big dogs, and I mean this is universally the case right now for big accounting firms there are pouring loads and loads and loads and loads of cash into AI applications with nothing to show for it. I have yet to see a single exception to the rule here. The amount of Money that is getting dumped into AI things. Accounting specific AI things. What do we have to show for it? The vast majority of accounting professionals still haven't changed their habits to be using an AI assistant day to day to make them more productive. And the whole notion of building this like proprietary tech based on, you know, your client data or something that just your firm has access to. No firm has done this. They've spent a lot of money on it. But the cool like novel solution still doesn't exist. So the thing that you're more realistically probably competing against is is ChatGPT just general tools getting really good and getting really smart. And the person asked the question brought up Intuit. I would say you're competing with Intuit through the lens of their productized offerings and how good AI can make them. So examples of productized offerings from Intuit. You've got Intuit Live bookkeeping a month over month bookkeeping service that starts at $200 a month, but most people aren't actually paying that. And then TurboTax, they've got like the TurboTax tax product that is like DIY, just a software product for very simple tax filings. You can go and get your stuff done. There's a done with you version where you can call a tax expert and they can give you some feedback. But then there's also a done for you basically a whole accounting firm path. And for small business prep, federal only tax Prep starts at $1600. That is for a small business tax return that is more than the average tax firm in the US charges for that work right now, AI will have an impact on these productized services. AI will make them much, much better. And so the net effect of that, and we talk about this quite a bit on the podcast, is those services will be able to come up market as a result. But I would argue right now there's a big old gap in the types of clients that professional accounting firms ought to be taking on and the types of clients that say a bench like bookkeeping service can serve. Bench is like, you know, fine for the most simple situations and it's going to be far from perfect, but it's still better than nothing. But then the step up to a professional bookkeeper, to an accounting firm, to someone that actually has some expertise in your domain, that's a really big step. Bench, I think is still like $300 a month or it starts at that accounting firms doing bookkeeping like professional bookkeepers. I mean by, by the time I was out of my firm, we really weren't interested in projects that were less than like two grand a month. But I would say, like, most of us don't have any, any business touching something below 600 to $800 a month. And so there's a gap there where these product solutions can come up market. And frankly, that's probably a good thing for us. It all comes down to how we communicate this and how we educate our clients. But right now, if you're charging $1,000 for a small business tax return, you can point to TurboTax their little done for you service and say, hey, federal only here is $1600 and you're complaining about me charging you $1000. Do you want me to send you over there and you can pay 1600 and then when you come back next year, I'll charge you 2400 because we're doing a much higher level of service. But I'll probably have to charge another 1200 bucks as well for the tax resolution work from the return that TurboTax did. Like, this is, this is going to continue being more and more part of the conversation because these product solutions will continue coming up market. And our job is just to be able to confidently communicate what we do relative to what those service offerings do. So that TurboTax service, TurboTax, that TurboTax service, do they review the books before they put it in the tax return? They sure don't. Whatever that person is rocking up with, they're going to plug that number right into the forms and what percentage of your clients turn up to you with correct books. So it's just something we need to have confidence and be able to communicate. Because if we're looking for the silver lining here that, like, the upside of these things coming up market is that if you're not already further up market, it ought to force you up market because you can now map this stuff out. Like, think of it almost like a software feature comparison. Map this stuff out and say, here's what QuickBooks Live Bookkeeping does, here's what Bench does, here's what Pilot does, here's what all the product dies bookkeeping services do, and then here's what I do. The main differences being you're actually going to build a real relationship with somebody and have, like, consistent support year over year. You have vastly more access to like, the expertise and the collective expertise of my firm. Like, it's just a fundamentally different service offering than what you get from productized solutions. And as much as we love being the hero and saying no, that service sucks and coming in and doing more for less. Let me, let me hit you with, with some hard truth here. Doing more for less. There was a, there was a time when I prided myself in that. Now I think I was just a sucker. Doing more for less. It means I'm working harder than everybody else in the market and getting paid less to do so. Is that something we ought to pride ourselves in? Think about who become the victims of, of overwork and not being able to run a profitable firm and all that. It becomes your staff having to work too much, able to make enough money. It becomes your family not having the flexibility to spend time with them, being constantly burnt out because they're trying to do too much work. Is priding ourselves in doing more for less worth those trade offs? I would say it isn't. So we need to find a way to either do more for more, that is we do more and better work than these people. So it costs more or less for less. And that's what the product dye solutions are doing. They're coming in at the bottom of the market. They're trying to find a way to like, hyperscale this thing. And for a certain type of buyer, that may make sense. But if you look at TurboTax and it costs 1600 bucks to get a small business tax return done, please don't hang your hat on, on the fact that you're cheaper than them because the level of service you're providing is, is vastly superior. So if anyone is at risk of, you know, AI and all of that, it is the folks that maybe aren't willing to acknowledge their place in the market. And that's usually because we're anchored in the past and we're anchored in and what our engagements are today. And we're anchored maybe in our identity as it has been up until here. But increasingly it will be hard to run a profitable business unless we're acknowledging our place in the market and where we have to be. And that starts with being able to like, confidently communicate what we do and what we do differently to our clients. TLDR pretty sure still be able to run a solo firm in an age of AI. Today's episode is sponsored in part by Client Hub, the practice management system that delivers WOW seasons year round, not busy seasons seasons that will dazzle your clients for two reasons. One, ClientHub is drop dead simple, man. If you're too tired of a practice management system that just feels like you gotta have a PhD in learning something new, Client Hub, you hop in. The vibes are great. It just all Makes sense. But two Remember there's a second reason Client Hub offers a game changing client experience. That is you can actually get clients to like collaborate with you and be helpful on the platform because the portal wasn't this like afterthought. Bolt on now. Very cool. Recent development in Client Hub Magic Books Review Twinkle sounds so Client Hub syncs in the transactions from your QuickBooks file. You can run an AI analysis on it like from inside of Client Hub. It'll highlight any potential issues you can mark like on the balance sheet in the P and L, you mark each account one by one, whether or not it's been reviewed and but if you want to troubleshoot, it'll pull you straight back into QuickBooks like so you don't have to learn like a whole new troubleshooting tool. If you'd rather sort that stuff out in QuickBooks. Other cool stuff it'll identify automatically Expense inconsistencies, purchases without a payee, purchases in parent accounts. Why is why can we not disable that in QuickBooks? Large transactions, new accounts, new vendors, new customers. It's magic Books Review inside of ClientHub. I think you might like it. Learn more about ClientHub. Check out the link down in the show notes. This episode is brought to you in part by makershub, who helps you automate your accounts payable department with AI. There's still such a huge percentage of businesses today that rely on like manual approvals, even paper processes and stamps and all that stuff. That's because most accounts payable products do not give you like the level of detail in your approval processes that you need. Maker's Hub got a bunch of flexibility here from separating bill approval from payment approval because oftentimes those are two different groups of people that need to manage that. But when you can't separate those approval workflows, you end up kind of like fudging. Well, this person's got the keys to the castle. But we'll let them improve this bill because they're the only one that can make the payment. But they may not actually know anything about the bill. By separating out your bill approvals and your payment approvals, but also being able to drive these workflows based on any little fiddly item on the bill. This is where they're using like AI vision models and large language models to extract better information from builds than we've ever had before. Having that flexibility then in the approval process we are like saving loads of time by using AI to automate extraction and then having a greater level of control over approvals. Super powerful tool makers hub would help so many of my clients that had like hairy, ugly AP workflows. To learn more about that one, check out the link below down in the show notes. Next question. This is a Q and A Friday. You got questions, Pop them down in the comments. Shoot me a dm. Shoot me an email. I saw this one from from Jacob Oberlander. It's a firm owner in New York. He shared this on LinkedIn. He said we're at 32 over 30.4. He said at our firm we spread the workload evenly across the year so there's no mad rush or crazy crunches. This morning he was chatting with a few other accountants to see how they're how they got through tax season at their firm. They've completed 32% of all returns for the season. And he shared sort of how they approached this. He said we defined tax season as February 1st through September 15th as 227 days in total. So each day represents 0.44% of the season. His argument, like the way that they run their firm, there's virtually no overtime. There is no like big crunch up to the tax deadline. And the thinking is like you need to be opinionated on what percentage needs to be done week over week, month over month, like where should you be? Most firms, they kind of just sit back and see what happens and that can be a stressful thing. So some people like working more in busy season and getting some of that time back in the summer. I think the trap there can be is oftentimes it starts innocently enough like that and then you never actually end up getting that time back. But whether you want to pump in those hours or whether you want to do something like smooth throughout the year. And even in my cast practice in my bookkeeping firm, we had all sorts of versions of this. Cause we had some folks that we did quarterly, annually, but even within a month this was the biggest bottleneck of the business. Is like, well I can't take another client that wants to go out on the 5th of the month, right? And so the bookkeeping version of this is probably on a much tighter cycle, probably monthly. There are a lot of ways you could measure this. You know, tax returns or month end closes, they're not a perfect yardstick by any means as not all tax returns, not all month and closes are made equal. I will say they're better than nothing. And this is one of those things where we super don't want this to take the time that it requires to do well, and so we don't do, do it, or we look for software to do a magic version of it for us and then we end up disappointed by that. The reality is like this capacity planning, it's not rocket surgery. Like you're a spreadsheet away from doing this. A really big, sweaty, sweaty spreadsheet that you're then going to have to kind of put somebody in charge of to continue updating. But I very commonly hear like, people don't know how to do capacity planning. They're bad at it. I think the reality is we know exactly like how to plan this stuff out. We just don't allocate the time to it that's necessary. And this is a really common thing in single owner firms. It comes up in a bunch of different contexts, another one being like staff management. It's because you're still like in the work and managing clients and there's jobs that you want to do and jobs that you don't want to do. And we all really, really want to just set up all these projects in our software and assign them to people and for those projects to just get done. And for whatever reason, people aren't capable of just getting that stuff done or sticking to the deadlines. And why does it have to be so hard? And before you know it, you find out weeks later that like, we're way behind and you got all this stuff stacked up, right. And so there's this perpetual frustration with like accountability and why can't people just deliver to deadlines and stuff like that. And the unfortunate reality is this is why managers exist. I wish the folks that would come to work for you didn't require management, but the reality is they do. And obviously that's, that's a spectrum. You're gonna have folks that need a lot of hand holding and other folks that don't need quite as much. And I think this is one of those areas where we often think, well, we just haven't found the right framework or the right software or the right this, that or the other thing to solve that problem yet. Just like capacity planning, when the solution, honestly oftentimes it's just not that sexy. The solution is we just kind of take the time to do it. Or the solution is we need the person with the skill set that can like come along and help these people and understand why they're running behind and take care of any blockers for understand is this, you know, the fault of the staff person? Is it the, the fault of all of us for not getting on the client soon enough to get their stuff in. Is it just the client's fault for dragging their feet? This is like just one of the sort of core frustrations with management, especially in a single owner firm, is in some ways we end up being allergic to management because we got other stuff we want to do. And it's the exact same thing that I do with my kids. When I'm most annoyed and frustrated and rude with my kids. It usually has absolutely nothing to do with my kids. Right? It's because there's something else I need to work on or something else that's on my mind. And that like the way you interact with your team can be very, very similar. You're feeling pressure from a bunch of other things and then you find out they're not getting crap done and it's just doubly annoying. Right? There's arguably like no more important thing to track than over either the annual or the monthly time horizon. Like, where are we at today? In fact, we did a video on the main channel recently. I'll link it in the show notes around. Like, as much as I don't like reporting, we did a video around kind of like the daily, weekly and monthly feedback loops that we ought to be paying attention to. Like for all the data that our systems give us, what do we, what should we actually be looking at? And how do we build that into sort of this, this routine that is the responsibility of different folks on your team. Because if it's not part of something that has to happen on a recurring basis, then it's like you don't really use those numbers. They're not driving day to day actions. And among the most important ones is like daily it being someone's job to stay on top of anything that could be falling behind. And this is like, this is all very, very obvious, but in the vast majority of firms it isn't anybody's job to stay on top of this stuff. And when it isn't specifically someone's responsibility and it falls to the boss, and usually it's an annoyed boss at that point because they're like, why is this not working? Why is this not a thing? Also, this isn't my job. I'd rather be working on someone on something else. I'll link that video in the show notes. I think it's very relevant to this conversation. This is kind of similar to the conversation around manual processes and how there's many things inside of accounting firms today that still have to be done manually, like fetching, you know, fetching things for A month end close. Like, there's just so many things and there's so much like shame associated with manual processes because our software vendors tell us that manual processes shouldn't exist. And thought leadership content, you know, it's always about how to automate stuff. And so the trap then becomes, well, if I can't automate it, then it's. It's almost like that process doesn't exist and it gets left to be done until the last minute when somebody's trying to wrap up a month end close or something like that. And it's like, no, when it can't be automated. Manual processes like those tasks still need to be documented and they need to be assigned to someone that's not your professional staff, especially if it's a manual tedious thing. The fact that it sucks that they exist doesn't mean that we shouldn't acknowledge their existence and make them someone's job. And I'm like, sure, manual tasks are super uncool, but not acknowledging them for what they are and then your professional staff having to do that stuff in the course of their work, I would say that's more uncool. And for sure we should try to find better ways to do all these things and systems to better manage capacity planning and all that. But step one, it is almost always the manual version that we're just not making time to do. And it is. I mean, it's just like all things, this is why we suck at capacity management, is everything takes more time than we think it will to do well, for the same reason that when you roll out of bed and you're like, I'm going to get these six things done. You get to the end of the day and you got two of those things done and you're like, why do I never get as much done as I wish I could? And then you multiply that over the course of a year, however much you think you're going to get done over the whole year. It's hard to be realistic about that stuff. And oftentimes we even project that expectation onto other people of like, well, here's all the longer that it should ever take. Says the person that just got two of the six things done right. I know that's human nature. It's a really hard part of managing people is, is seeing what's real in that versus what is like our human nature over expecting. It's also another argument for reconsidering incentives inside of your firm. Are folks incentivized to get more work done or are they incentivized to sit in a chair for 40 hours a week. I would love it if my team was equally motivated to line my pocket and get work work out the door. But the reality is when you stress out about projects being late and clients getting upset about that, the staff like the. The members of the team that are working on that stuff, they're not worried about the impact of that client leaving on the firm. They're worried about you getting mad about it. And until they have some sort of incentive and in getting that work done and that client sticking around, then your incentives ultimately aren't aligned. We've done a lot of content on this in the past. Production based pay. Basically folks being paid based on the work that goes out the door. Augmented with some some element of like client satisfaction. This episode is sponsored in part by Verito. New Sponsor Alert. Have you ever gotten that gut drop feeling when a. When a server crashes right before an important deadline, then just make your blood boil. If you've ever gone through tax season, let's zoom out any season of life with unreliable technology. You know just how much your tool crapping the bed at the wrong time. We. We just can't have it. Okay? That's why we're talking Verdo here today, okay? 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Financial Sense gives your team one place to track client work, assign tasks, follow up with those clients, run reports and hit those ever so important deadlines. Thousands of firms use Financial Sense, including Fiscally professional Corporation, a 30 person accounting firm. Jessica Wong, a director of the firm, says Financial Sense gives us the Pulse check. We need ensuring we stay on track. The checklist templates have standardized our onboarding process very effectively. It's good. And we've done a number of demos of Financial Sense on the YouTube channel, if you haven't seen it yet. Right now, teams of two or more, you're gonna get 10% off the team or scale annual plan. Take Financial Sense for a spin for free at the link down in the show notes. Okay, last question number three. How to stand out in a busy niche. This was a comment on a podcast from Firelands Accounting. I'm interested in niching into bookkeeping for beekeepers. Actually live in an area where that might make sense. And then Romeo hopped in. Unrelated, how do I stand out in a niche that has heavy competition? What's more niched down than beekeepers? I think, I mean, almost all of us, if we're thinking about specializing, you look at folks that are already in that domain or near, and you're like, well, I can never do what they do. And as with all things, comparison is like, kind of the enemy to doing anything interesting. Because especially in an age of algorithmic consumption where we're scrolling feeds, those feeds show us the people that are just the most prolific people at that thing. And the feed was not showing you those people when they sucked at that thing. But there is no way to be prolific at a thing without first sucking at it. And especially when people. Oh, I heard a really. I read a really great line in a book about this. Hang on, this is a. So it's a little Harvard Business Review. Harvard Business Review, Classics, Managing Oneself by Peter Drucker. I'll link it in the. In the show notes, it talks about, like, what skills are worth building, what skills aren't. Because in some ways, we need to lean into the things that we're best at. But then we also still have to always be growing. And like so many of the people that we look up to in a specific domain, we only look up to because they're actually prolific in a collection of different things, like public speaking or being persuasive or something like that. Like, I'm. I think I'm. I'm pretty good about firm running things. I'm in no and by no means the best, but I'm. I'm convincing. I figured out the media production stuff got better at public speaking. Like, those are the only reasons why you're here. Like, if I wasn't good at those things, I would just be, you know, a firm runner somewhere. But even the folks you look, look up to around, like technical tax subjects. Usually they're great speakers. They can put things into terms that we can understand. Oftentimes they're vulnerable. Like they do it with storytelling. Like those are adjacent skills that support the main thing you do. And so when you see those super prolific people in an algorithm, they've put probably more time and effort than you today would think is reasonable to get to that level of success. And so it's completely unfair to compare, like where we are at today with where their journey has taken them, which for them was not at all where they would have expected when they were in your shoes. Right. So you think about doing, you know, real estate in your accounting firm or working with tradies or something very specific. And then the moment you see someone else who's crushing it there, you're like, oh man. Well, can't do that now. The reality is we are way more solutions aware than anybody else that's on like the other side of this transaction than most buyers. I mean, look at the number of like dental expert firms that are out there. There's always room for one more. It's good to have like clear messaging of, of what makes you different. And it has to be something more tangible than we're good at this stuff or something like that. It has to be something that's actually verifiable and not just this, this notion that we got this person to write a testimonial. But also every niche is bigger and more complex than it looks from the outside. We've talked about this before, where the real opportunity with niching down is actually probably what you discover next. Because every industry category has an whole ecosystem of people who serve that category. And any one of those people, if they came to find out that there was a firm that worked with people just like them, they would be jacked. I was, I went to a new barber the other day. He had only ever worked with a generalist accounting firm. I told him there's people that just work with barbers like you, and I can actually connect you with one. He'd been doing this for like 25 years. That blew his mind. He was over the moon. He's like, that's amazing. Like, all I've ever worked with are just these generalists that have been doing this for like 20, 30 years. I would love that. He was so, so excited. Now, is that wrong? Because Barbara's tax returns the same as anybody else's tax return. That reaction, how that person felt when they found that, like, even if the tax return is the exact same. That's why it's different. But going into a niche, you find a whole bunch of other adjacent stuff. And so actually just taking beekeeping as an example, you and I, in all likelihood we know absolutely nothing about beekeeping. So from the outside we're like, there's no way that that's a big enough industry for me to niche into. But the reality is today we know absolutely nothing about it. This is something chatgpt is really good at helping you think through and explore. So I just prompted it. I'm considering niching my accounting attacks from in the beekeeping space. The trouble is a large influential accountant has already cornered the market. What are some adjacent business networks I could serve? The more nuanced the better. And so it gives me a list of sort of adjacent types of folks that you can serve. Some of these will be good, some of these will be bad. Some of these I may think are bad because I don't know the space well enough yet to see what a like very real problem that is and just how many providers there are. Some of the beekeeping adjacent ideas it gave me Migratory pollination service operators. These companies truck thousands of hives to crops such as almonds, berries and seed canola. Pollination now drives the largest single cash market and US apiculture. I don't know what that means, apiculture. But trucking thousands of beehives to various different types of crops, that's interesting. Queen bee breeding and genetic outfits. Queen rearing can yield 70 to 80% gross margins. Yet these businesses struggle with biological inventory costing R and D credit eligibility for some words that I can't even pronounce. Third idea, Mead Hard honey seltzer and craft fermentation brands. Number four, honey based cosmetics and nutraceuticals. Hive tech and pollination analytics startups, Urban and corporate rooftop apiary managers. Interesting. So here's a company that manages hives on 2200 commercial buildings to earn lead credits. Whole bunch of other ideas here. I've. I mean I've used this analogy so many times and it's something I stole from the win without pitching manifesto book. I'll link that in the show notes as well. It's really good. Well, we're just going book link crazy today, aren't we? I always try to credit quotes like this, but then sometimes I go and look up the original source and it's like well, they took it from something else. So I'm sure this isn't a new concept. But basically then the super applies to niching down it's basically you're standing in a room full of doors and you're afraid of walking through a door because by doing so you can no longer explore the other doors. Right? This is the single biggest blocker to accounting firms specializing. This is. This is me now talking is you're like, I like doing a little bit of everything. But the reality is it's all you've ever known. You haven't done the other version of this. You're afraid to walk through that one door because it means you can't go in the other doors. What you don't realize right now because you haven't gone through the door yet is in the next room is another room full of doors. Every room you go into. We're now back to me talking. Every room you go into is a more nuanced problem, a more nuanced type of entrepreneur that you're serving. And nuance pays. Nuance is more protected. Maybe nuance feels risky because you're like, well, what if that thing goes out of business? That's why there's more than one door. People like to use the example of restaurants during COVID like, well, what if something happens and all that stuff gets shut down overnight? In my experience, the process of niching down, not only does it expose you to like the larger ecosystem of everything else that's going on in that space and a whole bunch of nuanced opportunities that you would have access to that probably aren't subject to the same extinction event, even if that does come to pass. But the more important thing is you learning the skill of specialization. Because this isn't just an accounting firm thing. This is an every type of business thing. Learning how to speak to a very specific avatar rather than shouting in the void with. Into the void with something general and saying, why can't I hire that marketing agency and actually get them to do anything that converts? It's just because we're not serving a specific enough type of person. And social media platforms and the reach that we have on the Internet now has just like 10x the power of that. So if you're thinking about going into a space and you see somebody else there, or even if you have a friend that's there, there's plenty of space out there. Like, our minds can't comprehend just how big the world is, the level of nuance to the problems, how many people out there are suffering with this. Oftentimes we get frustrated because maybe we can't get that next person. It doesn't mean you found everybody. It means You've plateaued with your current approach. If you think you've found some sort of ceiling on what you can charge, buddy, there is no ceiling on what you can charge. Otherwise Big four wouldn't exist. So when you say, well, we're charging what we can command in the market for this today, that's a plateau. That's not the ceiling. But the, the most important thing you develop by going through that exercise is just learning how to specialize, learning how to build a new network. I don't care how old you are, this isn't going to be the last time you do it. And it's an incredible skill to develop that hopefully also gives you, you know, a feeling of agency. Because agency is, I mean, hopefully this is something you develop over time. It's. It's probably the biggest thing that new firm owners are lacking is the idea that, like, well, we'll just see what the universe sends me and I hope I get clients. Agency says I actually know how to build this. And I'm pretty sure if I do X, Y and Z, it will lead to this. It is business manifestation. Manifestation feels too, too woo woo. But there is definitely some trust falling as to it where, like, I'm pretty sure if I go out and I build relationships with like the biggest consultants in the space and the podcast hosts and the people to write the newsletters, like the network hub type people, the associations, I'm pretty sure that I could go and just do helpful things for them and that will lead to a compelling business. That's agency that's being like, oh, no, I'm actually going to commit time to this because I'm fairly certain it's going to lead to positive things for my business. Seeing that come, like, come to life, that's amazing because we all want control, right? Like, we all, we've all got our hands on 10 and 2 and we want to be able to dictate where things go next. But until you've actually gone through the exercise of doing that and you have that confidence, which then becomes a superpower, then you're kind of just sitting back and seeing what the universe serves you. And this is a new development for me. I mean, I definitely was not wired this way when I was first running my accounting firm. Really wasn't until up and up at the end when, like, we started becoming known for some very specific things. And I'm like, oh, okay. There is actually a version of quote unquote marketing that is just me being out there and me going to shows and being visible that will drive a better type of client. We had plenty of clients. We already had more clients that we could serve. But those efforts were still worthwhile because they would bring in higher paying work that would let us cut, you know, two or three of the old projects, make the same money. And a third of the time, I think we've gotten long enough. I was at scaling new heights in Orlando this week. Met a whole, whole ton of y' all. We had a meetup on the expo hall floor that 100 plus people came to. It was amazing. Thank you so much for coming out. We've got other live events coming up and, and a number more that are soon to be announced. July 14th will be in Los Angeles. And by we, I mean me. July 16th Denver. July 22nd in Chicago. July 25th in Atlanta. Jason on firms.com events is the place to find all that stuff. It's a mishmash of me speaking at other people's events and me hosting some of my own events. Would love to see you in person. It's the absolute best thing. It's cool for me to meet you, but then when you're there, you meet a bunch of other people who are into the same stuff. About 1500 people listen to this podcast every day. And so when you're there hanging out with a, with a, a horde of 50 other people, what always happens is you walk out of there with a couple new friends and that's I. In my opinion, that's like the very best thing that I can enable for you. That's it for today. You got any questions, Pop that stuff down in the comments. We'll pull it into a future Q and A and I'll see you next time.