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Today we're digging into what may very well be the, the biggest PSYOP in public accounting, selling advisory to your clients. Don't get me wrong, we should all be good advisors. But where did, where did the, the advisory mind virus come from? What were its origins? How much of it do we need to take seriously? Like, do I need to feel all this pressure to all of a sudden be a cfo? That's what we're talking about today. Let's. All right, so for the last probably decade, a huge percentage of the education being put in front of public accounting firms has been around the imperative that is leaning into, quote, unquote, leaning into advisory and selling advisory services to our clients. And it's, it's framed all sorts of different ways from being a more profitable way to run your firm to it being this business imperative. Because automation or RPA or AI or something like that is going to take away all the stuff that we do today. And so on the other side of that, the only thing that's left is advisory. And all of these things have nuggets of truth. So today, like what I actually want to show you is why this is such a massive story. Why it's a narrative that's pushed so hard so that we can be more aware of where we learn from and who we're getting our information from going forward. Because there's a hundred versions of this going on now, even a lot of new stuff cropping up around AI. But the, the foundations of this whole narrative. You need to be a better advisor. You need to sell advisory services for the first time and all that. The vast majority of this came from, from two parties that were driving this conversation. Number one, SaaS, platforms, software platforms who enable this, where like this is, this is their bread and butter, is enabling people to do this sort of advisory work. And it's not wrong to do this advisory work. But it is like skewing the education that's out there and skewing a lot of around us that we may not be aware of. Hence calling it a psyop. That's just kind of fun, right? Psyop. What's the weird, what are the spooky things around us that we're not realizing are happening? Mind virus. Mind virus used to be fun, but it's gotten spoiled by the woke Mind Virus label. Now whenever I say mind virus, I think people think of that. So let's stick with psyop. So the first party that was really driving this conversation, SAS tools, and this exploded in the age of reporting Tools. We had a, we had a window there from like 2015 to 2020 where these SaaS reporting platform, they were just going to connect to your accounting ledger and unlock these huge, hugely powerful and profound insights just because they were able to connect themselves to the data. And so our jobs as the advisor was to buy the ledger platform but then also buy this reporting platform, which these things still are like 50 to 200 bucks per client per month. Like they are not cheap. Our job was, was to then connect the reporting platform to the accounting ledger and be the steward of that reporting data and walk our clients through it and make sure that they understood it. And then there would be insights and money would be made and a tremendous amount of investment went into this reporting category in a really short period of time. And to be clear, like reporting tools do some cool stuff. You had like kind of after the fact financial reporting tools. Increasingly you, you had sort of powerful like budgeting and modeling tools, like a giraffe. But then you also cash reporting tools, both short term and long term cash planning tools that were all kind of some combination of we're doing like machine learning sort of predictive stuff to we just present the data in a, in a prettier way. And so these are companies like, you know, Fathom, Reach, Spotlight reporting. There's a whole bunch of them. I don't fundamentally have an issue with them. I have an issue with how much that narrative took over the education space when it comes to how you run a small firm. The other party in, in the SaaS space that was pushing this big time was the ledger players was QuickBooks was 0. And the reason for this, and there's actually some other platforms this, this applies to as well. But the reason for this is when you have a mature platform and I'm buying, you know, whatever the base tier is in this, in this ledger platform or whatever the other tool is. Once that company has been doing that for years, where does that company go next? Like they have to have something more that they can sell you. They have to go out, they have to do acquisitions, add more things, more products, add a higher to the thing that you're paying for now. And the path up the value ladder, ladder for these platforms was for a while advisory was more advanced reporting stuff. So you had a While there where QuickBooks actually had fathom, the reporting platform built into like a real premium version of their platform. Zero acquired, I think it was Spotlight maybe six months ago, which felt like a headline ripped from about five years ago. But it makes sense because if They've got you on a $40 a month plan. How do they get you to a $70 a month plan advisory? It makes sense. Like, that's a logical progression, right? So then you better believe that the education coming from these platforms is going to be super focused on, well, here's the value of actually being a better advisor to your client. And we're going to give you the software to make this easier that impacts, you know, not only the webinars they're running, the thought leadership they may put out in a newsletter, but also the conferences as well. If these are the conferences you're turning up to, the programming is going to be geared around what are the things that are beneficial for the product. And this, like, there's a way to perceive all the things that I'm saying that is like very, very negative crapping on all of this. It's not 100% this way. And conferences do still make room for really great content that has absolutely nothing to do with the product, but it's, it's all around you in ways that we're not always aware of. So, like, the person that I want to speak to here is the one that's like, man, I keep hearing about this one thing, like, over and over and over again. I don't know how seriously to take it. And you may even feel like lesser than or behind the times for not leaning into that thing. And like a very, very, very basic example of this. Let's take offshore hiring, because I do talk about offshore hiring a lot, and we have partners who promote their stuff that do offshore hiring on this channel. But it's a very controversial thing, right? So why do I sit here every single week bringing up offshore hiring? Well, one, it's because I did it and it worked really, really well for me. And two, it's because every single week when I run group coaching calls in my community, I'm honestly surprised by the percentage of firms in there who are leaning really, really hard into offshore hiring for the first time, like in the last 12 months. Like, they are still getting started with this, but they're having tremendous luck with it. That's why I talk about it and as it turns out, like, the economics to advertise in my content. If you do that type of work, like if you're a recruiting agency, if you help firms find talented folks offshore, evidently if you're in that line of work, you get really good ROI by advertising on my channels. But the reason why we're having that conversation is because of the, the huge volume of firms I see having success with that. If you compare that to this advisory conversation that we're talking about, how many firms do you know outside of that content? How many firms do you know that did a full big old pivot to selling quote advisory services and it being transformational for their firm? I do, I do know some. Like, to be clear, I know some, but I know just as many who also were even like featured in these conference talks and stuff like that, where behind the scenes they're like, yeah, no, we're not. It's. It's kind of sort of an extension of what we already did. It like a big pivot and maybe isn't quite as big of a thing as it's being made to be. So two different flavors of education there. One, a thing that I talk about a lot, another one that's just kind of in the accounting sphere, something that seems to always be coming up and there's always webinars about them. It's. It is a aspirational thing, I think, for folks to talk about on social media and like, the reason why behind the scenes is while, yes, can you do this and run a better firm? For sure. And there's a ton of people who have, but I wouldn't say it rises to the imperative that it is often presented as. So the first party that's really pushing that, as is software platforms. The second party is the advisors who, their business model is to come alongside you and show you how to do more advisory work that, that pays better. And I don't want to like, shade any of those folks because there's a version of that that works for people, but there's also advisors that will come and tell you how to sell life insurance and be a financial planner and all of these different things where there's bad versions of it, but there's also good versions of it. And as the trusted advisor, I mean, you can sell your clients just about anything that they need. And you know, financial planning is a really good, a really good example there. Or we have tax clients who, who, who live and die and hang on our every word. And they have this implicit trust in us. And if one day we say, like, hey, we'll manage your money for you. Also, we know like, that has absolutely nothing to do with tax or bookkeeping or anything like that, but if the client loves you and the client doesn't have a relationship like that with another financial advisor, they'll be like, oh, awesome, yeah, totally, I'll bring my money, or at least some of my money to you to manage for me. We're in a very privileged place because because of the fact we have this trust, we can sell people other related stuff as long as it's something that they actually need. This episode is sponsored in part by the folks at Canopy Canopy, the Practice Management System. I have spent a lot of time digging through PMs trying to filter through the 43PMs now that I believe are marketing to North American firms. As you probably know, Canopy is on my short list of recommended practice management systems. And nobody likes having any more tools than you absolutely need to have, right? That's why you start building your tech stack with the practice management system to let that do as many things as possible. And when it comes to all in one erskine, pretty hard to beat Canopy. In fact, a couple years ago when we did this giant roundup of feature comparison of all the PMs on the market, Canopy may have actually had the most complete feature set of any PM out there. Now that's not always the answer, right? Just more, more, more. But I can tell you we're also pretty burned out of just like having to build these ridiculously big stacks. So having a having a PM behind your firm who has the mindset of we want to try to pull everything that we can into one platform for you and to know they're going to keep investing in that in the future, I can get behind that. Hey, I'm a big time tech nerd, but I also don't like playing software Night Janitor so if I can get all that stuff in one place as much as possible, I want to do that. That's Kanopy. To learn more about Kanopy, check out the link down in the show notes. This episode is sponsored in part by TeamUp, who helps you directly hire talented accountants in the Philippines. Why do you hear so much about the Philippines specifically? Used to be like India, right? Why is the Philippines caught on? A few things that I'm stealing from this excellent salary guy team up put together. You can swipe that down in the show notes. Four reasons for why the Philippines has caught on 1. They've got a critical mass of talent. Loads of people there with decades of experience and also just coming out of school. It was the only time in my firm running journey where I knew I could start the hiring process and have somebody within 30 days. In fact, I just talked with someone who did that like within 14 days. So the talent is there. 2. English fluency Very good English speakers will have an accent usually, but very, very common to have strong English speakers in the Philippines, cultural compatibility, very strong Western influences in the Philippines. So generally easy from a work culture standpoint to get connected with and then a work ethic. So Filipinos pride themselves on bringing energy and optimism to work, which isn't always the case when you're hiring somebody. Right? So to, to have that enthusiasm on your team to provide an opportunity to these folks, an awesome career, a better path, opportunities for their families, like they turn up to work with just an entirely different level of excitement. And that was, that was my experience. Anyways, Team UPS put together a great guide for how to get started with this stuff. Swipe that one down in the show notes the clients that we're working with, they have a changing set of needs. There could be all sorts of different things from maybe different types of regulatory compliance that are, that are maybe specific to an industry. Maybe it's navigating, you know, a hard tech change that AI is driving. You know, you think about when we went to the cloud back in the new kind of earlier cloud accounting days. You look at E commerce sellers, for example, they had tremendous logistical headaches and still do. Getting all that transactional data into the accounting system or an aggregated version of it, just like even knowing how to navigate that. A very niche problem to try to navigate. And what I would love to see is rather than like this blanket, be an advisor, sell advisory. Rather than this blanket, here's this thing that we should sell all of our clients. Let's actually solve very specific to those client pains because I think what makes us relevant long term and makes us one of, one of being able to charge more for our work and all that is expertise through a very, very specific lens. So what are the problems that that loggers have or phlebotomists have or anesthesiologists have anesthetists? I don't know. To me, the solution for this is the same thing that we always talk about, which is today I have client 1.0, but I can see a client 2.0 where all of those clients are actually my A clients today. So today on the client list I've got A, B, C and D clients. What would a client list look like? That's just a client system. That'd be pretty sick, right? That's client list 2.0. But when you get to 2.0, then you're like, oh dang, we actually have this client here that just said yes to this YOLO price. They're actually paying twice as much as any of my other clients. And they're incredibly happy to do so because we just found a new pain point that we can solve for them. Maybe Then client list 3.0 just looks like that new a client. And now like your firm is 4 to 5x is as profitable as it was before. But that only happens by making incremental developments and being very in tune with the things that pain your clients. And it's one thing to listen and have deep conversations with clients and hear those common pains. It's a whole other thing to have to educate a bunch of your clients on. Here's this thing that you should pay me more money for than the other stuff that I do. I know you don't need it today, but let me tell you why. There's a world where you can do that and it is possible, but that's hard. And there's a version of that that goes too far. Like your half million dollar a year client, like half million top line, who comes to you and says, you know what I need is a cfo. My advice to that person is not going to be, yes, let me pull you into this very premium service offering I have. My advice to them is going to be like, no, you don't, Jim. You're running an itty bitty business and a CFO is going to cost over half of your top line every year. The ironic thing with how you actually run a scalable advisory service is it usually starts with that one person that's the unicorn that can shoot from their hip and be the good advisor and speak experience into, you know, a, a pretty wide breadth of client situations and generally be helpful. But while that person can build that practice up, when they look around them, all the people that they've hired, most of them are going to have that secret sauce. So the problem is always, how do I scale this secret sauce? It's why it's very hard to run a fractional CFO firm where the people who come work for wouldn't be better suited to just go off and serve those clients themselves. And so the path to a scalable advisory practice is advising, to a system, is getting to a more productized version of how you do advisory, which is only really possible if you're doing it through a very specific lens. Like you can have like a kind of four step framework for how to advise. But for any old small business, that four step framework, it's kind of going to suck as opposed to that four step framework for taxidermy companies. Awesome. You're probably the only one doing this. You're the only game in town or online talking about advisory for taxidermy companies. So it's not a super high bar. And that four step framework is very specific to what they do. That's great. And I've got a more productized way to do advisory. But then like what is the ultimate path of productization? What's the most turnkey version of productization? It's building software. It's a software platform. Then doing that advisory for you and now the snake has fully eaten its tail. You've, you've become the software platform. And I think if it were truly that easy to do fully productized advisory when the software platform, I've already nailed it. Where like any company can just plug in their accounting ledger and then get these incredible insights. There's a lot of companies that have tried to do this, none that have done it to huge effect. Even inside of QuickBooks you've got like Intuit Assist and you've got, we've had kind of these different versions of advisory built into different platforms and none of them have gotten a tremendous amount of, of traction because in my opinion it's very hard to give really helpful, actionable advice that can be generalized across different types of businesses. Now if you can land on a framework that you can scale the heck out of, and that's extremely rare, very hard to do, has to be through a very specific lens for a very specific type of person. But if you find that, do it. We've talked about like, you know, how to stand up your first offer. Like what does an offer from an accounting firm look like where like you'll, you know, review the last two years tax returns or like this kind of 30 day financial crash course where you go through their, their accounting file as it is, and every single week you'll kind of spin out some insights of what you see there. Like that's an offer that you can stand up, that can be attractive to a specific type of person. And those are great for getting new people in the door. But these only work when they're like grounded in a very specific need for a very specific type of person. What most of us rely on instead is like you're the unicorn that can shoot from the hip and dazzle somebody in a room. Like that is what most of us are. And then we try to hire people and scale that and we get frustrated when they can't do that as good as you. Right. And this is why selling more advisory for most firms is frankly the last thing that you need. Because advisory requires the most scarce Expertise that you have the most scarce resource that is the unicorn person that can dazzle a client. They're the hardest people to find. And so if you go out and you stand up a new service offering or if you, if you introduce a new tier to your proposals this next year, that's like will the two hours of live coaching a month with you. If you upgrade to this next tier, how the heck are you going to staff that? A whole bunch of people say yes to that. And now you're going to irk clients because you don't have the bandwidth to like deliver on that advisory work while also doing all the other work. And so that's frankly that's why most firms especially like growing firms shy away from that most senior level kind of CFO type of work. So are there firms out there that do it really well and can crush it and are there ways to scale it 100%? But has the importance and the imperativeness and all that of selling advisory been blown 10x out of proportion? Yes, I would say if selling that type of work is your sweet spot, is what you love doing a hundred percent do it and actually leverage the software platforms that'll make it way easier to do that work well. But if that's not you and that's not how you've made your hay thus far, I don't think you're missing out on anything by not going and like doing that seven day sweat lodge retreat to learn how to sell an entirely different type of work that you may not even know how to staff yet. There may be versions of that that, that's helpful for folks but I think it's blown out of proportion because the people that are doing the educating in our space, they have a lot to gain by that. And so how do we be aware of the, the psyops that are happening around us to, to get access to better education and understand the incentives of what people are putting in front of us? Well for one, anything that's a software webinar from a vendor, recognize it for what it is, they're not doing it unless it isn't somehow good marketing for them. And that, that in no way is unbiased. Some are better than others, some will go a little further off the beaten path away from the product just to put something out of value with the hope that like it adds some credibility for the brand. So Ignition is a company that's always been really good at this. They put out tremendous content, invest a lot of, a lot of money in it, even if it's not directly related to the product. You learn from it. That was how I first started using Ignition was I learned a bunch from their content and I'm like, I don't even understand what their tool does, but now I'll learn about it. But in general, if it's a webinar put on by your, your software vendor, many of them are extremely useful. Just know you got to see that through a filter, right? Number two, any sort of sponsored content. So for example, the demo days that we do on my YouTube channel, they are products, features. They're not reviews. In no way are they reviews. Reviews have to be a hundred percent independent from, you know, the, the brand that you're working with. And I'm getting paid to do demo days, so they are not reviews. This is where like does that person have a framework for the stuff that they will do or not? I think that matters. I only do demo days for products that I actually recommend. And so we, we will recommend products and then we do outbound to those brands to say, would you be interested in sponsoring this or that this. Next Sunday's Video Keeper had a really big call out. In the video, I emailed the CEO Ben Stein. I'm like, hey, here's, here's the deal. I'm doing this video. It's about X, Y and Z. Keeper's got a really juicy call out in it. Do you want to sponsor the video? And if you do, I will follow that up with like a 60 second demo so they can actually see how it works. He says, yes, they sponsor that video. That's how most of our deals come together. But if for example, it's someone who takes affiliate revenue from whatever that platform is that they're talking about, like no, no part of that is independent, right? If they have a coaching program, if they have a community, like these are kind of the biggest things for influencer type folks right now is you'll be like, why did that person all of a sudden start posting the social media every single day? Oh, it's because they have this, of this community or something like that. Honestly, it's why I like I'm just so overly cautious about talking about my community because I just don't want to I that like the trust, people being able to trust these channels, like there's nothing more important to me than that. The moment that you lose people's trust, they're gonna stop listening to you. Because when I look around in the accounting space, like there's just so few people who will speak their minds. You see all these, like many of the same people that are trotted around at conferences and webinars and stuff like that, and you talk to them behind the scenes and they're like, meh. They're not as enthused or the messaging of what is like, stood up in this webinar or conference talk may not even be something that they're 100% into. And because, you know, 90% of the educational content that we have out there to consume is through a sponsored lens. Like, that's what gets me excited about doing what I do, hopefully in a more independent way. Maybe I'm, maybe I'm psyopping myself, but like, that's the entire purpose of these channels existing to me. So that trust is, is so important. It, it's like when you make that friend and then they have you over to the house for the first time and you find out they're in an MLM and now they want you selling Tupperware or something like that. That sucks, right? When you're like, oh, dang, I thought we hit it off. Oh, I thought that this was really useful, really helpful. But it turns out there's a hard sell at the end of this. Or it turns out they've got this way that they make money and you know, like, you can't blame them for that. Like, what else are you going to do? And hopefully most of these people, like, they're going into this line of business because they truly believe in it. Today's episode is sponsored in part by cloud accountant staffing. They will help you find super talented accountants in the Philippines. But they're not just going to drop off after, off the map after that. They will help you with a lot of the logistical issues that come with hiring folks in a whole other country. How do I get them a computer? Like very basic IT things like that. What happens if, if they wake up one day and their computer doesn't work? How do they get a replacement? How about power outage? I was talking with the cloud account staffing folks the other day. They're like, they actually will help the folks that they pull into firms like get. Have like backup generators, like whatever they need to have a redundant power supply. Redundant? Redundant. That's not the right word. You know what I mean? Cloud account staffing, what they do goes well beyond just finding smart people to come and work for your firm. Because the reality is there's kind of other logistics that come with that, some easier to solve than others. And I need help. I do. And cloud account staffing wants to make that as easy as possible for you. To learn more about that, what they can do for you, check out the link down in the show notes gang. Today's episode is sponsored in part by the fine folks at Carbon. Every year Carbon does a report about AI and its impact on the accounting industry. They survey a whole bunch of accounting firms. You may have heard, we actually did a whole episode of the podcast about it. It's a really, really good report. Bunch of interesting insights from real accounting firms to see how they're using it, what's working, what's not working, networking and kind of get the commentary on either ends of the spectrum. A lot of really interesting trends that developed just in 2025. A whole lot less fear in 25 than there was in 24. People seeing it more as an opportunity. Still a very big divide in the excitement of leadership versus staff level folks. That means we as leaders need to be doing a better job communicating and normalizing AI as a part of work so that it's not this amorphous, spooky thing that folks kind of are unsure of. Lots of exciting stuff happening there. I'll link access to that AI report down in the show notes. Totally worth checking out. I think you like it. Kind of what all this gets me to is like what then is the most real transparent source that I can trust? Nothing beats other people who are doing the thing, other firm owners. How do I make a whole bunch of friends that are doing this? And this is real quick, this sounding like me chilling for my community again because the biggest like most eye opening moment I had was at zero con in 2018 when I hadn't done much stuff outside of my firm bubble. And I sat down and I had a bunch of conversations with other people who were at different points on the journey than me. And I was like, I could care less about the people on stage right now. Can you just give me more time with the, the like practitioners that are here? This is where I'm learning. That's why I went out and created a community was I wanted like folks to be able to meet each other in a safe space. A space to have permission to meet a whole bunch of other accounting firm owners and to facilitate those connections for them. That's kind of what my whole business is built on. But you don't need my community to do that. You need to like be, be willing to be the one to send the weird dm. Like just, I mean I've got a. How old are they? I got a, a 4, 6 and an 8. Year old now they're getting big. There's people that have tuned into my stuff from when I had a a0 and a2 and a3 year old while I was running a 40 person firm and publishing two YouTube videos a week. What were you running from, Jason? Anyways, my kids, really hard for them to walk up to a kid they don't know and like introduce themselves and then start that thing. Let's not lie, let's not lie to ourselves. Exact same thing with adults, the fear of rejection. But making those relationships starts with being the person that's willing to like put your neck out there. And people will say no and that's fine. But the life that's optimized for putting out your like putting your neck out there. You're going to make so many more connections than the folks who are not willing to do that. And as we talked about on the podcast a couple weeks ago, if you have like friends and other firm runner runners to kind of tick all the boxes of what you need for how you run your firm, like validating software decisions, talking strategy to talking just emotional support, like if you have the people in your network that can tick all of these boxes, you're not then a normie that has to go like live in this kind of psyop filled world. You don't have to buy into all of these things. Buying into these things can sometimes be a shortcut. But I'm not going to see a webinar likely and buy into some sort of new Kool Aid if when I come over here and have conversations with my 30 friends who also run accounting promoters and every single one of them are like, yeah, no, like here's the hole in that. And here's the hole in that. I'm going to trust those people that actually run the firm before I'm going to see all that other stuff. Recently in a chat with some other firm owners, we were talking about practice management systems and one person bought into a practice management system simply because they had like three or four other people they could rely on who used the same system. They were like, I wasn't sure if it was the best one or not. I just knew when I went down that path I'd be able to get all the help that I needed from my buddies who did the same thing. That's not relying on support from the PM system, that's relying on your network. And there's nothing better than having a network to learn from to to psyop yourself into a new normal. We talk about that A lot. What's not normal for you right now? Maybe that's selling, you know, expensive tax planning packages. Maybe that's selling advisory work, selling CFO work. Maybe you've got sticker shock about putting bigger prices in front of clients. Well, when you hang out with a whole bunch of firm owners that are already on that journey and already do it, just a matter of time before that becomes normalized for you. So where are the spaces where you can meet these people? People? I think social media is still the best. Like still social media. A lot of problems with it, very low contact context. Maybe feels a little high risk because anybody can be on social media, but you can still make tremendous friendships there. Like so many of you that I've just meet on the Internet, like we become real friends, we hang out at conferences, like that stuff just happens. But as long as you're a lurker and not engaging and being part of the conversation, you never start building those relationships. And if there's one thing that I'm, that I'm super, super proud of, that I hope that I enable for people, it's that because we put so much content out, we, we are kind of like a lighthouse for a certain type of, of person or folks with a certain type of sensibility for what's the right way to run an accounting firm. And so I end up being a hub for those people. And so if my content be at the comments section or replies on posts or the folks that are standing around hanging out at conferences, if I can be a hub for those people and make enable connections for those folks, like, that's amazing. That's awesome. In fact, oftentimes there'll be a couple of people that I know online that I don't know are connected with each other at all and will be in person. And they like, they're like super happy to see each other and high five and all that. I'm like, I didn't know that you guys were connected. And they're like, yeah, no, we like both commented on something and then got into the DMs. And now we, we like hop on a zoom call every single month and just see how things are going. Like, man, like, that's awesome. Like, that's the ultimate escape for isolation and running an accounting firm is having these relationships. It gives you a supreme amount of confidence to be able to say, yeah, I'll buy into that, but I'm not going to buy into that so much. Whether it's a webinar, whether it's my content, whether it's things that I'm saying, did you see that demo day that Jason ran for that one platform? What do you think about that? Like, you think that, is that like, to sell Audi you should have a group of people that you can validate that stuff with. Like, that's really, really powerful and that's how you stay grounded in like what's real. When it comes to running accounting firms, there's very, very few people who don't, who are putting out content and investing in being helpful online, who don't have this sort of in the background motive to do so. Right. So I started creating content before I had any sort of paid anything that anybody could do me, long before any brand would ever sponsor my content. But these days you can make an argument Jason produces content to funnel people into his community, or Jason produces content to sell ads on his content. And that's the business. Like, that's how it makes money. And that within that box, like there's, there's great above board ways to do that and really awful, sneaky, like evil ways to do that. Right. And so I, like, I have not escaped this myself. I'm just hoping that I'm doing the, the, the good version of it. But the thing that's even better than me is, is the friends, is the people that you can connect with, the folks that you can have like frank conversations with, check in with once a month. Like, that is, that's the way to do all this, escape all of the storytelling and the stuff that is done through like a promotional lens. I want that for you, man. So if you're feeling pulled in a whole bunch of different directions, as I know a lot of us frequently are, especially if you're like so jacked into the thought leadership thing. It can be so overwhelming. The whiplash of all these things that you feel like you need to do, the, the opportunity to ground yourself like that lies in, in just making some connections, making some friends that are both ahead of you and behind you on the journey. Like, that's how you escape all of this stuff. Do it. I've, I've kind of had rants like this before where I've like pushed people to post something in the comments and like friendships have been made from replies there. Um, like don't be afraid to comment on that stuff. You never know who you'll meet and honestly, just the right connection or two can make such a profound difference in your life and how you run your business and how sustainable this all feels. It is a thousand percent worth doing. Thanks for coming to the sermon today. Gosh, that got preachy. I don't know. I just still see the advisory thing a lot out in the wild. And the advisory thing's legit. Like, you can totally, like, rebuild a firm around just selling advisory. Obviously, people do fractional CFO and stuff like that, but just the way that sometimes it feels like the screws are just really put to accounting firm owners to say, you don't understand. You have to do this. And it's like, there's a lot of entrepreneurs with a lot of problems that we're solving in really meaningful ways, being tremendous advisors, but stopping short of, like, standing up a new service offering and saying, like, oh, you should now pay us for this specific thing. It'll make sense in some cases, but I don't think you can let, like, the advisory service tail wag the dog, if you know what I mean. Gang, thank you for being here. If you got any questions, drop them in the comments. Disagree. Drop it in the comments, too. Help season the conversation, and I'll see you in the next one.