The Niche Software Set To Blow Up This Accounting Firm [The most profitable accounting firm partnership]

Pretty wild story today, but a great idea I'm always looking for, for what is the side door into building a super niche client list. We've talked through some wild stories recently of how real accounting firms have built super, super specific client bases by becoming the go to person in this weird specific context. And you end up with this like unlimited client glitch where you just have more people coming in the door than you could ever work with. But they're a very specific type of person, which means you can run a much more profitable, more scalable firm as a result. I got a great question from a listener the other day, an idea that they've got that we're going to actually execute on. We're going to actually do it today. And there's a version of this that can work in any accounting firm. Let's get into it. Okay, here's the question. I think this will get your wheels turning. They say I run a solo practice trying to build a niche in a specific state, their preschools with state contracts to provide subsidized care to low income families. So in this state, these preschools get funds to provide subsidized cares to low income families. Question goes on. You've mentioned a few times about working with software vendors in the space. There's one that I'd like to reach out to, but I have no idea what to even say, what can I offer this software company that would be a benefit to them? Now we had a quick back and forth and I got the name of the actual software platform and I probably won't get too specific here. Just know like this is a very niche thing. So you got a whole bunch of preschools in the state and if they want to provide care to low income families, there's a process by which they can get funds from the state. And this software platform, it handles a lot of that. And this is important because there's a bunch of reporting requirements that come with getting this money. So you get the money from the state and there's all sorts of like validation of the families that they're eligible for, this sort of tracing of the funds to ensure they're being used appropriately. And then all the other stuff, the logistics that comes with running a preschool and this, this platform handles all of that. And the accounting firm, they use the platform. So wouldn't it be nice if this company's marketing budget could be deployed to get your accounting firm out in front of a bunch of existing and prospective users? Right. This is a great side door in to building a niche Accounting firm is leveraging somebody else's marketing budget to put you on blast. And this is the wild thing about marketing budgets, is that there are people out there in the world whose job it is to literally just spend that money. They will get in trouble if they don't spend that money. Which means if right now you're like, ah, maybe I should go to a couple of trade shows and just have more conversations, a great way to do that is to find a software company you can support and get them to fly you out, get a free trade show ticket on them in exchange for doing a half day in their booth. Most of these software companies are clamoring for experts. And if you run an accounting firm, you are an expert, you have a specific expertise, and if you are a fan of that platform, they want to put the fact that you are a fan on blast. So when it comes to things like no sponsored stage talks, would it be more interesting to have, you know, another sort of C suite person on stage or to have, you know, a segment with someone like you talking about how you use it with a whole bunch of different preschools? Pretty much all these platforms have like blogs where they're always looking for content. They have social media accounts where they're trying to feed that, that hamster wheel. Feed the beast, feed the machine. That's something that you could help them with. I know quite a few firms who, their entire pipeline is full simply from referrals by a niche software platform. And you know what, what the person is dealing with here who posed the original question is, is what do I even have to offer, right? How do, who do I even begin to reach out to? I think this kind of starts with like, don't sell yourself short. Every marketing department is looking for stories, success stories. And if you think about the whole ecosystem of people that software platforms serve, accounting firms are very unique because we are a hub, like a window into a whole bunch of people. That's why, like, you know, you're payroll platforms of the world and stuff like that have accounting firm channels. If they can sell one accounting firm and may actually mean converting a hundred small business users. And so it makes you a really, it gives you a very unique perspective. And if these companies want you to be kind of a mouthpiece for their mission and the things that they're trying to do and someone who can validate the value of their platform, I would argue you are extremely valuable to them because of the, like, the bigger context that you have access to from working with a whole bunch of clients that could potentially use their platform. The most obvious application here is in marketing content, but that could even go back to like product feedback, helping them understand how to better talk to even other accounting firms. So in this exact situation, what would you do? Like, what is my process for figuring out how could I try to weasel my way into a relationship here? And the very first thing I did, I went to the website, look and see, like, is there an actual former partnership kind of approach here? And most software companies don't have this. I find this is more common with maybe membership organizations or governing bodies where there's a more explicit approach to here's what partnership looks like. Software companies, most of them, especially niche software companies, they don't have anything that formalized. Some of them will have a sort of partner directory that is a place for you to come and find service providers that work with that type of business. And if you're like me, I've historically been pretty sour on partnership directories because I think a lot of accounting apps have this and they stink like the Pro Connect directory. I think most people would say they haven't gotten a ton of value from that. But even like, further down the spectrum of stuff that wasn't that useful, you know, payroll platforms, having partner directories, like, it seems like just about everybody has a partner directory where you can find an accountant that uses the app that they use and little if anything valuable has gotten through that. Like, in terms of the, the value of the work that comes from those general platforms. But I would argue this is because they are such general platforms. Because I have a huge number of stories of people who are set up as partner directory firms in like, niche industry software where their entire firm runs off of those leads like they have more than they can even handle. And when you're concerned about, like, how do I even crack the door and get somebody to listen to me. This is the other nice thing about like niche industry software is oftentimes these aren't huge teams. These aren't people that are inundated with all sorts of requests like this. So it's a little easier to get in the door. So first check, is there a formal partnership offering here? In the case of this software platform, there isn't. And so I'm going to look for just like, what is the front door? Let's start with the front door and see how far that can get us. This website has a general like info@ their domain.com email address. Also has a phone number. And I know this is weird, this is uncomfortable. I'm A millennial man. I don't like phone calls any more than the next guy. But my approach here, starting out is going to be as simple as knocking on the front door. So I'm going to call their main line. I'm going to call this. I'm going to send an email to this general email address if I can't get anybody on live. And I'm going to say something like this. Hi, my name is X and I run an accounting firm who works exclusively with. And then something very, very specific. In this case, it is preschool operators in this state that hold state subsidy contracts. So let's just rewind that sentence again. Let's say I'm. I'll pull a state out of thin air. Let's say this is Kansas. I run an accounting firm who works exclusively with preschool operators in Kansas that hold state subsidy contracts. How does that sentence make you feel? That sentence gets me excited. That is such a specific sentence where you hear that and you're like, dang, okay, those are domain experts. And the exciting thing here is that's the exact same avatar that this software company wants to serve. And when you hear that, you're like, that is a wildly specific accounting firm. But that's the point. And so the person on the other end of this message is going to be excited for the same reason that it gets me excited. Wow. Like we have a shared mission and this is like this is more than just business. Like this is actually a really cool kind of mission oriented sort of thing they're both doing. Have you heard the news from one of this episode's sponsors, Keeper Introducing Keeper Scale. It is a whole new package of cool razzle dazzle stuff including automated accruals automatically tying out like what that schedule ought to be to the books, rolling that forward month over month. AI journal entries hold up. It'll take complex source docs like payroll reports, ulta settlement statements, I don't know what that is and POS exports and turn them into review ready entries. You can post straight to the ledger. Buddy, I like what you're cooking. Keeper smells nice. Keeper. It is a month in automation platform for bookkeeping firms. It is like a task management had a baby with a ledger. Got a deep integration there. You can see all transactions inside of Keeper. Sort of one place to manage all of your month end closes. And they've been working on some pretty cool new stuff. If you're a bookkeeping practice worth learning more about Keeper, check out the link down in the show notes. Can I let you in on a Secret about offshore hiring. This was. This was actually my experience. And now that I've talked to more folks that have done it, a lot of people go through this progression. So in my account community, realize about 40% of those firms, it's almost 600 firms, almost 40% of them are doing offshore hiring. And that is. That is way higher than that was like three years ago. World's just gotten smaller. I think Covid had a bit of play in that. Distributed work is kind of the norm, right? So it doesn't matter where your team is. American accounting, it's not that much different than elsewhere. Even US Tax, you find experts around the world for that sort of stuff. But the team behind this video sponsor, Team up, they noticed the same thing that I did, and that's that most firms go through a progression where they first hire a middle person to employ the staff and all that because they trust that that service a little more. And that service handles a lot of the logistics with them, the employee. But then you end up paying as much to that service as you do to the employee themselves. This is where most firms start with staffing. But once you get past, like higher four or five, what I commonly see is they then just start hiring people direct. They're like, I actually just want to employ this person directly because half of what I pay, I don't want to go to this other group. This is what Team up was born on. What TeamUp does differently is they will help you directly hire accountants in the Philippines. No middle people. All you actually pay to Team up is a recruiting fee, and that's it. So whether you're just getting started or whether you're maybe further along and you got now talented people that are trapped inside of these other organizations, by the way, virtually impossible to get those people out of those contracts. Team Up's a great way to find folks to come work for you directly. Learn more about Team Up. Check out the link down in the show notes. Okay, back to what I would say. This is the type of accounting firm we are, but we love your platform. And as the backbone of the people we serve, the two questions for you. One, are there any support channels available for firms like ours who are serving a number of schools on your platform? Notice we're not coming straight out with an ask. And then number two, is there anything we could do for you? Testimonials, blog posts, even joining you at an event? We are so aligned here. I just love to find a way to work more closely with you. So I'm going to try the main phone line with a message like that. I'm going to try their main email inbox with a message like that. If I strike out there because this, it's not a huge software company. I mean they're decent size. Like they will do 10 to 20 events a year it looks like. So they've got some marketing budget. But on their site you can also see the leadership team. So you go down that list of folks and if there's anybody that has a title that is something along the lines of partnerships, that's probably the place to start. This company does not. In fact, I'll just, I'll read you the roles on the leadership team. They got a CEO, a Vice President of people. That's more an internal role, Vice President of Customer Success. That's like a customer facing role. VP of Software Development, Director of Project Management, maybe Senior VP of Operations, a cfo, a Director of Quality Assurance and a Vice president, a product. None of those things are really outward facing. And so I probably wouldn't normally do this, but in this case I'm probably going to fall back to the CEO. And by doing some googling and learning a little bit about the CEO, I can see some of their background. I can see they've been in this space for a while, at least not with this software company necessarily, but they've got kind of some industry experience here and they aren't like often interviewed. And so what I would actually do in this case is I'd reach out to the CEO and just with a couple of Google searches I was able to find their email address and I would reach out to do an interview. This is someone who is not often interviewed and it is much more likely they will respond to a request for interview than it is you asking them for a favor. Right? So give the context. Say, hey, this is the accounting firm that I run. I would love to publish an article like on our blog, in our email newsletter, have a 20, 30 minute conversation with you, ask how you got there, like how you, how you got to this role and what you see kind of for the future of this space and you'll be surprised. Like in a smaller software company like this, usually their response is they're flattered. And if you follow through with writing this article, which you should, they'll probably even share it around. And so you've gone from being this like cold outsider person where they're like is this legit or not? To the people in the company are actually sharing around this thing that you did, let alone the fact you Just had a half hour conversation with the CEO and now there's like an actual relationship there, which to be clear, that is the goal. The goal isn't like this tit for tat, like, I want you to send me all of your clients. Like, I don't. Maybe you negotiate something like that at some point, but the prerequisite to any of that is them believing that you will be like a helpful person towards what it is that they're working on. At the end of the day, everybody has a set of KPIs, a set of success metrics, and in business, they will see you through the lens of what can this person do to support my success metric? Now, coming right in and asking what those things are, that's usually not going to work for you. You build a relationship with them first and learn how you can be helpful for them. And as an accounting firm owner or a leader, you, you have more to offer than you may realize because you have such a unique perspective having worked with a bunch of different clients. Now if you're really having a hard time cracking this nut and getting anybody to talk to you, another thing to look at is live events. You show up, you know, plan on being at a trade show that they're sponsoring or they're exhibiting at. It's the one place where they literally cannot run away from you. And you will meet a few people on the team. You can kind of give them your story, give them some background about you. And as long as we're not like outright asking for things and we are showing ways that we can be helpful to them, like, you know, if they have an online community offering to help out and answer some questions in the, in the online community, go on their podcast, guest, write a blog post. As long as we're offering to generally be helpful, folks will be open to that. I mean, someone in a partnerships role, that's literally their job, is to find people that can be helpful for what they're doing. And the beauty is every industry has niche software and they're all, they're often like very small, not super mature companies. They're not like, you know, the, the CEO of Zero or of Intuit or these, these are not humongous companies where these people are dealing with like inbound requests all day long for interviews and all that. These are generally smaller, more traditional companies where you can actually build a relationship with these folks just by doing a bit of outreach, if you can, if you can manage to do it in a way that isn't alienating. Right? And it's totally fine to be like hey, there's a mutually beneficial business relationship here. But. But making this work comes down to like who are the human beings involved and what's the best way to make a connection with someone they're like on the ground. Highly recommend this because every industry has their own version of niche software. Actually somewhat related got a voicemail from another firm looking to do something similar. Count and support operators are standing by.

Hi Jason, just wanted to give you a call and let you know where I'm stuck. I would love to get your help. I've had my business for gosh over 20 years now. Never really took it 100% seriously because I've always been employed. Now 20 year side hustle grow my business and marketing has always been an issue for me. It's been primarily a tax practice which now my clients are asking me for more accounting services. So I've decided to bring the accounting portion back into the business.

We'll talk about that.

So just looking for some guidance on good places to start on building. I have a lot of experience in the entertainment industry which I worked for over 10 years in CPA firm thought that might be a good niche. Let me know your thoughts. What are some good things I can do to really rev this thing up and getting going? I would appreciate it. Thank you so much.

Let's rev it up. Vroom vroom. That was a voicemail somebody left me on my telephone. You can do the same. 516-980-4968 seriously, call it right now. You will love the voicemail message. Okay, thank you for the question. 20 year side hustle who? I was talking with somebody about this at an event last week. They were on the fence about going off and doing their own thing. They've got a few clients, they're like I don't know. I don't know if I can actually do it yet or not. I'm not quite there. Here's the thing man is that so many, so many things like this in our lives will not happen until we we go all in on it. And if you're, if you so much of this is about self belief. If you are stuck on like can I really do this or not? Before you know it like 20 years can go by. And this is not to say that that there is anything wrong with a 20 year side hustle. There's a version of this where it's like hey this is some supplemental income and I enjoy working for somebody else. That's totally fine. But if you can see in your future, you ultimately want to be a firm owner. And if this is you, you know, it's you, even if you haven't done that yet, right? I say that and you're like, you get that little tummy tingle and you're like, yeah, no, I'm going to do this eventually. If that's, you know that. The confidence to know that this is going to work in all likelihood will not come until you've committed to it. Like, don't wait for the day where you're like, I'm a genius, man. This is going to be no problem for me that, like, you, you're probably gonna be waiting a long time for that. Now, hopefully, like, this content, the conversations we have here, hopefully this can give you, like, some, some bit of. Of confidence to see a path forward and hear the stories of others. So you're like, okay, okay, I can see that they're doing it. This makes it feel a little more in reach for me. But, man, if you're not careful, like, years can go by where you're doing this sort of halfsies thing and nothing's really getting your best. Don't get stuck there. Now, something that came up in this question. Historically, they've done tax. Clients are now asking for bookkeeping, so they're going to start doing bookkeeping. Let me, let me give this one to you straight. There's nothing wrong with getting into bookkeeping. But, no, there will never be a day when your clients aren't asking for more. And the only one that can ever draw the line and make the counter argument to not do more is you. Like, your clients are never going to be like, stop, just do tax. Because that'll be easier for you, and that's a simpler and probably more profitable business for you to run just because there's less going on. There will never be a day when clients stop asking you to do more. As soon as you ask for bookkeeping, they're going to ask for bill pay, they're going to ask for payroll, they're going to ask for wealth management. And so the fact that clients are asking, while it is a signal, it doesn't necessarily mean that you need to do it. Now. Oftentimes we get sucked into doing more rather than doing more. Specific. Right? And so of all the ways that we can differentiate our firm, a really hard way to differentiate your firm is to be the firm that does everything. That is like being the cheesecake factory of accounting firms. That's a really, really tough business to build and run profitably. Well, I should say, that's not a hard business to build. It's a very hard business to make any money doing. And sometimes you may feel like, like I don't have the market power to be able to say no to doing these things. Maybe that's the only way that I can win clients. And that's true. Like the degree to which the leverage you have here and being able to be selective about what you provide is a byproduct of like, how many substitutes are there out there. And so if I'm a generalist firm, I might have to do all of these things to win clients. But if I'm at the other end of the spectrum, where I'm serving a very specific type of person and the perceived alternatives of customers is they're like, well, I mean, this is the only lady that does entertainment accounting, or the only person that does X, Y, Z, then they're going to take whatever you're going to give them. And I've brought this up on the podcast a number of times now, but Blair Enz's most recent book, the Five Conversations, very good book. He pushes people not to win business on the breadth of your surf of your services, rather to win work with a, he calls it an armor piercing approach that is provide something their current provider doesn't do for them, that's very, very specific to them. And then when they have that great experience of you doing that one specific thing for them, they'll probably want you to do the other work too. So in the case of, you know, these preschools, they have very, very specific needs that a generalist accounting firm's probably not going to help them with. Like the generalist firms, they're going to come in and do the most basic version of, of, of bookkeeping and then leave it up to people on the team to kind of fill in all the gaps and do the rest of the compliance. In all likelihood, there's an opportunity for you to come in and offer something very specific to their type of business that their current provider will not do. And then when they see the expertise that you have, they'll bring the rest of the work over to you. Because by the way, the very best clients out there, they're currently the client of somebody else of another provider. They're not like ringing up accounting firms from the yellow pages looking at Google reviews. Those are not like AAA clients that are flapping in the breeze and in a pinch and need a provider. The best clients, they already have a provider. And they may be quote, unquote loyal and unsure about whether they want to change, which is yet another reason to give them a very specific way they can test you out to solve a specific problem their current provider doesn't solve before making the jump. At that point, they've kind of de risked the decision because they know how great it's going to be working with you and you could charge them top dollar for that work they're coming in for. So I would say don't add bookkeeping unless you really want to or unless you don't have any other leverage. Like, like. And if you're in a spot where you can only win work by doing both bookkeeping and tax, that's hard. Like, let's find a more specific type of firm to run more specific pains to serve so that we have more leverage and we can control what services we're willing to provide and the way in for this person. I mean, they said it, they got there by the end of the voicemail, right? They worked in the entertainment industry for a decade. So what is a unique kind of set of experience or interests or something about you that makes you better suited to serve a specific type of person than some random generalist accounting firm? We all, I believe, have some version of this. At the very minimum, we have our own interests, the things that we can do that don't even feel like work. But this person, they've got 10 years experience working in the entertainment industry. Now the entertainment industry, that's very general. I would push you to get more specific. That's almost like saying real estate where it's like, well, that could be about a million different things. Let me tell you about an app that perfectly combines three very important things that normally you need a bunch of different tools for the app. It is one of today's sponsors, Klein Hub. Let me tell you the three things they combine. Number one, an amazing client experience. Because the whole portal experience, the client facing stuff in Client Hub, it was actually thought out from day one. It wasn't like this bolt on where most practice management systems are like we're going to make the ultimate operating system for your accounting firm. And then later on they're like, oh, it looks like we all need to have client portals. Let's make that Now Client Hub was built from the ground up to be super easy for the client to use. That is, that is trifecta point number. Trifecta point number two is it is also super easy for you to use because my gosh, do practice management systems now require a PhD in learning how to use a super complex Thing not Client Hub. They're keeping it simple in like a good way. Third part of that trifecta, Deep bookkeeping workflow. Sorry tax people, sucks to be you. Client Hub very good for bookkeeping, controllership, CAs, stuff like that. Cause it's got super deep integrations with Quickbooks and Xero and even has like some built in month end close automation stuff now so you can sign off on like all the all like each account on the financial statements like right inside of Client Hub. Very cool. They're taking it to a very different level of depth specifically for bookkeeping than most practice management systems are. And you get all that in one platform Buddy. What more do you want me to do for you? Worth checking out if you're doing accounting bookkeeping stuff? Learn more about Client Hub. See the link down in the show notes. In a world where there's more just AI over hypery than ever before and you see a new landing page every day that's like oh this sounds exciting. But then you can't actually tell if there's anything real going on there. When all that's going on, it's nice to know what things actually work, what are real, what is tested and firms are big fans of. I'll give you one what firms are like actively using and having success with. I'll give you one tool. Stanford Tax Buddy. They were kind of first aboard like the AI tax workflow hype train, but they're now, I don't know, three or four years in. I know probably well over a hundred accounting firms that love Stanford Tax is a really, really good solution for better organizing your 1040 work. It gives you a single place where you can pile all those documents in. It creates this like AI checklist based on the prior year tax work of exactly what items we need from the client. Then I could just chuck all those documents into one place regardless of how they come in and it'll automatically check those items off the checklist and then give me like an actual like work paper in the cloud as an alternative to an Adobe Acrobat PDF. Whether your clients want to work with another portal or not, there's a lot of people that are just now using Stanford Tax internally because it saves you a pile of time on the just the managing of the documents and all that stuff. It's a great company, they've been around an AI accounting solution that's actually really really good. Worth checking out if you do 1040 work. Learn more about Stanford Tax. Check out the link down in the show notes a few different Approaches here to building the client list from scratch. And to be clear, this applies to folks building a firm for the first time, but also established firms who are trying to find a more profitable client. The path forward for established clients, it's finding that one niche client, that one more specialized client. And all of the principles that will help you to find it are the same whether you're a brand new firm or an established firm. But one way in the door here is talking with every other accounting firm you can find in that space and learning who they don't serve and why. Because you're going to find a whole bunch of accounting firms that are specialized in, quote, unquote, the entertainment industry. And within that, they're excited about all sorts of different things within that bubble. And man, if you can find firms with the right mindset, they are happy as a clam to send your work your way. They probably have clients who are great people, but no longer a great fit for what they're trying to do. They may want to do tax work, but outsource the bookkeeping. Maybe they want to do the opposite. They just want to do the books and they want to send the tax work to somebody else. There's a bunch of those firms out there. And so that's oftentimes a great place to start. I was hosting an event in Chicago last week talking about the guy who's like, yeah, I'm trying to sort of reach escape velocity. Hopefully by April next year we'll see if we have enough clients to do that by then. I said, we, I one person. And I looked around the room and There are about 35 other accounting firms in there. And I'm like, man, these are all local Chicago accounting firms. You make friends with these people, you've got more work. I mean, 10x the amount of work you could possibly handle at just in this room right now, if you build some relationships with these other accounting firms and that like to be clear, that was a rare target rich environment where a whole bunch of people turned up from the podcast, from the content, so that like they're all very collaborative, everybody's very happy to be there. They got a, they got a virgin pina colada or two in them and stuff's happening. Like people are literally like finding ways to support each other just in a couple of few hour kind of evening hanging out. And it just kind of dawned on me like there's a lot of folks early on who could probably very quickly fill up their client list just by working with other accounting firms. Man, you Want to talk about the value of a peer network? I feel like I rail on this every week, but there is so much to be gained by making friends with other accounting firms. You've been, I think you've been getting the event stuff on the podcast by now, but we got a huge round of events coming up to the end of the year. You want a super easy way to meet a whole bunch of local accounting firms, man, come out to one of the events I'm hosting. Just such cool people and amazing the connections that just happen. So my first bit of advice here is try talking with other accounting firms, like see what they're not serving that they could send your way. Likewise, you'll learn what's best for them and you could send them some work. Second, we're talking about software, right? What is the software specific to the entertainment industry? I did a couple of quick Google searches, like video and film productions. They have their own like dedicated accounting ledgers, some apps, rap book, entertainment partner, smart accounting, movie magic, budgeting, cast and crews, psl. Plus there are, I don't know what part of the entertainment industry they're talking about, but at least in TV and film production, there's all sorts of like union compliance issues and payroll and cost tracking. I mean, think about the logistics of, you know, Lord of the Rings runs off to shoot in New Zealand and all the people that are running out and getting burgers for lunch and just like who the amount of people spending stuff related to the production and what the budgets are and how many different parties, like third parties are involved in all that. I mean, it's kind of fascinating like what a fun accounting challenge that would be, right? And just how many people are involved in a, in a giant production. But there's all sorts of very specific software serving those people. And these are all potential partners for us. They are serving the exact type of person that you also want to be serving. So let's find a way to work together with these software companies. Last third idea governing bodies. And especially in the entertainment industry, you have, I mean, umpteen number of these from unions to like membership organizations. I think just about every little domain within quote, unquote entertainment is going to have some version of this where you can come in and be a voice and be helpful to that membership group and just be a visible person because quote unquote marketing, it is just visibility. How do you become the default firm for a specific type of person? I think we got to escape the traditional mindset of what marketing is, you know, paying somebody to Run your social media and put billboards up and all that stuff. It's like, no. Especially for small accounting firms, marketing is simply being visible and being helpful at scale. Like this podcast. This podcast is marketing. What is my business? My business is a paid online community for accounting firms. My business is also a media business where we sell ads to software companies. And someday my, my business might also be events. Right now, events looks like it's probably going to bankrupt me. But this podcast, the whole point of this podcast is to be helpful to people. The reason I give out my phone number and people can leave me voicemails and send me texts and all that, that is marketing. And so often accounting firm folks are like the most fulfilling part of what I do and why I do it is I just love helping entrepreneurs succeed. Man, that's good marketing. Just being helpful to people. I love it too. The people I love working with are accounting firm people. The very best types of marketing these days when so much marketing is just paper thin and like AI generated stuff, it's just being useful, it's helping people, it's making network connections and just being part of the conversation like that is ultimately the best type of marketing. And that's how you become the accountant within a space. Be it, you know, supporting kind of these mission driven kindergartens doing something new in the, in the entertainment industry. Thank you for the voicemail. I'd encourage you to do the same. Drop me a voicemail. What's my phone number? Drop me a voicemail. 516-980-4968. You got any thoughts for either of these folks? Drop that stuff down in the comments, gang. I'll see you in the next one. Thanks for being here. Foreign. We put together the biggest, scariest project my team has ever worked on. A big old run of live events around the country headed up until year end to to ensure that your 2026 is just the best year ever. Let me run you through the cities real quick. We're coming to Austin, Oklahoma City Festival, Phoenix, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Nashville, Chicago, DC, Philadelphia, NY City and Boston with some super cool half day workshops that roll into dinners. You get CPE for it. It is an event that is built for your entire team to get the whole squad feeling inspired so that if you are a firm leader, you're not feeling like you gotta put everything on your back. Headed into 2026 gonna be a super fun experience. It's gonna be a surprise guest at every city. We're going to record an installment of the podcast live at each of these events. You're going to be part of the podcast itself. What? And then I would love to see you there. To learn more, head over to jasononfirms.com events and I hope to see you there.