Riches or Royalty

Hey. Hey. Welcome to another episode of Marketing for Accounting Firms. My name is Matt Benker from Benchmark Growth. We do marketing for accounting firms. And this is the podcast. And today I have James Kwan. He has this really interesting framework. He and I were talking a while back. I was just very fascinated with this, this idea of there are multiple pathways to a business. And so maybe you want to have a lifestyle business where you're really, and it's just built around your personality and your preferences or you want to grow something that's much bigger than yourself and that there's some, some specific, different options for you. So with that, James, thanks for being on the show.

Matt, thanks so much for having me. I'm honored, truly. I've enjoyed all of our conversations. I think you're super smart and I love this category. Working in financial services and having some clients in this category ourselves. This is, this is awesome. And you and I have talked a little bit about this. With this, this particular industry so closely to ours as professional services, there's a lot that we've already learned in our space that we can hopefully translate into these other fields. But yeah, super excited to talk about this. We call it the Rich or royalty dilemma. Rich or royalty, fork in the road and path the decision that you need to make. And this stemmed from reading some books about startup situations. Andreessen Horowitz talked a little bit about this in a blog post. And Harvard Business Review had a, had an article with the titles around being Richer King. And essentially the dilemma goes something like, you get to the point, if you're starting a business where you may have, you're doing really well, you may have investors who come in and go, hey, you've done a great job. Here's a bunch of money and we want you to walk away. We don't want you to, we don't need you anymore. Thanks for doing what you've done. And there's, there's a soul searching issue that you need to wrestle with. Do, do I forego the dollars and being on a beach somewhere or do I take this business where I want it to go, where, where I feel like it needs to go? And what you said earlier, the, is it a lifestyle business or do I want it to scale? Well, selling it to private equity, they're gonna, they're gonna scale it the way that they know how to scale it. But lifestyle could end up being this tremendous scalable company also. So there is this kind of interesting path, an interesting decision that you need to make. And I always thought about that as. As kind of an interesting fork in the road, interesting philosophical decision that you have to make for yourself as an entrepreneur. And what was fascinating is I started to think about this a lot. It kept me up at night, and I started to think about this in virtually every industry. A lot of professional service firms. But also, I don't know if you know this. I have a food background, so I have a. For some reason, I have a culinary degree. And I noticed this in. In culinary as well, you have French Laundry versus Five Guys. You have the restaurants with 10 tables that are never gonna have more than 10 tables, and they're gonna charge you more the way they scale or make more money. They're gonna charge you more for each meal.

Yeah.

Versus, you know, this other company who is going to franchise the model. They're gonna sell $5 meals, but they're gonna sell a lot more of them. And in professional services, this happens as well. You have founders who are technicians. You probably know this. On the. On the creative side, I have a ton of friends who start agencies. They're designers or developers, and they can't let go of that, and they have to be in it, working in it constantly, and that's hard to scale that way, so.

Well, I was just going to say that's one of the things that was most fascinating about this for me is I feel like it speaks directly to me as a. As a founder, as a business owner, as a creative, as a. As a technician. I'm good at doing stuff. People like what. What I do, and. And really, the impediment to growth and scale as a business often has been myself, because I want it my way. I. I have very high standards. And this isn't. I don't think your model is saying lower your standards. I don't think that's. That's not what we're talking about. But I would reach points where other people on my team would make different decisions than me. And it's not that those were worse decisions, but they were different than what I would make. And so I had a tendency, probably still do, if you ask my team to get my fingers into things at times that I shouldn't because I like it a particular way. I think there's something about being an entrepreneur. There's a little bit of a control aspect that we all have, and that comes into conflict with what is needed to grow and to scale a business. So do I want a boutique firm that fits everything around me, and it's basically, I'm the firm, and then I have A team that supports me, or do I want to build a business that can grow, scale, change and operate without me so that I can disappear into it or. Or do something different?

So sell it. Scale.

Yeah, it's applicable to me. I know in the accounting space there's a lot of acquisition that goes along around a lot of firms the way their exit is to sell and retire, and that's where they're moving towards. But if the business is built around yourself, it's going to be really difficult to get to that point where you can sell it. So walk us through this. I know the. The original framing of this was the phrase you kind of used was, you can be rich or you can be king. And you kind of updated that, the phrasing a little bit to be a little more gender neutral. But walk us through. What do you mean when you say you can be richer, you can be king, or. I think it's rich or royalty is sort of the new framing now.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, fundamentally, we meet a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of founders in that. With that mindset, you know, needing to have their hands in things. You can't scale, Matt. Yet.

Right.

I think maybe in the next 10 years with AI tools, you can download your brain.

And then I've seen those. Yeah. Those virtual AI versions of people on video these days. Yeah.

It's a little scary. Yeah. I'm excited. I'm a futurist, so I feel giddy about kind of the stage that we're at. But, yeah, if you think about the words alone, being rich is trying to fade away a little bit, have your name a little bit less important. Build the systems. The systems are the way that you're going to get to that scalability or royalty. It's really about you. It's really about the way you do it. It's really about your creative magic.

Right.

And I use that term, or I use the analogy for five guys in French Laundry all the time. Thomas Keller is a genius. And you want Thomas Keller to be there, and he can't be everywhere. And he has. He's built some systems behind. Behind the scenes. But if I told you Janie and Jerry Morell.

Who.

I don't know who that is. Well, Janie and Jerry Morell has. Have five sons and they're the founders of five guys, Right. And they've created an incredible system. Who makes more money? Who makes more money? Five guys buy a ridiculous stretch, right. They make crazy amounts of money. But who. Who's more sought after? Who's writing the Cookbook, who's speaking at an event. Maybe, maybe Janie and Jerry Morrell are going to speak at some sort of events. But Thomas Keller is. He's the name, right? Yeah, 100%. So this is, this is kind of the, some of the questions that you need to ask. The fork in the road is really around, you know, does it have to be you? Does how much notoriety do you really want? And like you said, what, what is the end goal? Do I want to scale this and sell this? It's certainly going to be easier if you have systems in place for that. Really. Interestingly, the more I think about this, the more I'm putting together the outline for, for a book around this. The idea is that the roads do converge, which is pretty cool, is you could go down the rich path and become royalty. This is a great example of that is Jeff Bezos. So Jeff Bezos kind of famously has said there are two, two types of companies in the world. Companies that want to charge as much as possible and companies who want to charge as little as possible. And we will always be the latter. And Jeff Bezos is famous and he's going to be, he's a, he's a brand name, but he's, he went that direction. If you look at some early Jeff Bezos video and commentary interviews, he's super. He's a nerd. Like, he's very. There's a famous interview with him driving this like 20 year old car in the interview and he's. I don't care, I don't care what car I drive like this. It's all about the systems I'm creating. It's all about the company, it's all about the process. He doesn't, I think he in his heart wanted to be famous, but he definitely chose this path of creating systems and building something that was more scalable, more important than building a throne, building a kingdom that he can be king in.

So Jeff Bezos is the, the rich that becomes royalty. What do you have a good example of the other one?

Yeah. Mark Zuckerberg is the opposite there because he, he very much had that opportunity. You watch Social, you watch the Social Network and you see the, you see the. Read kind of the, the background story. There were investors holding money in his face saying, you're not fit to be the CEO of this company, so here's some money, you should go away.

Yeah.

And he very much said, no, I'd rather go down with the ship. I'd rather make less money and have it be my own than, than do that. And guess what? Eventually he got there.

Right.

Eventually they made some really great partnerships, really great investors, really great sage advice. And then they turned into a very scalable company and a public company. But there, there's. In that dilemma, there was very much a no, this is mine. It's going to be done the way that I need to do it. And I envision it. And pretty smart dude. And he was pretty right, I think, at the end of the day.

So there are success paths either direction. Obviously, to me it seems like there's more risk in the king path or the royalty path, because I can imagine a lot of business owners who are, no, this is my business. We're going to do it my way. And they are poor. They're not good business people. Right. They're not successful because they can't give up control. And so does it take a particular person or genius level confidence or something like that to go and be successful on the king path? Does your viewpoint rich is better than royalty?

Yeah. So my thesis is that there is no good or bad. It's just a choice. The bad is to try to do both. And that's, that's the, the trap that I see a lot of entrepreneurs fall into is that they want to be the famous inventor, the person. Person to go to, but then also try to build these systems. And there's a clash of the way that you're building your company if you do it that way. And so it's tricky. I agree with you. I think it's much harder to go in the royalty path. I think it's, it's tough because you have to be better than a lot of people. You have to be in the top 1 or 1% of 1%.

Right.

Thomas Keller, how many chefs are there? There's lots and lots of shows. Thomas Keller somehow has kind of continued to raise above and build his standard. And he's kind of an amazing dude and just a nice guy. And so lots of things in the formula and read Jim Collins gets a grade and built the last like you, you can see the, you know, humility is a formula for that. But when you go the rich path, it is, it is. These are systems we're talking about about there. It's a little bit more ones and zeros. The machine's going to work or it's not going to work. And you can tinker and you can play with it and you can continue to build it. And it doesn't really matter who you are. It doesn't matter who the team that you use. So for most startup, most founders that I recommend, I usually say let's start on the rich path.

Right?

Let's try to build some systems out. And if you start to create some really unique processes, if you, if you are able to do things that turn heads and cause people to pay attention, then yeah, okay, let's explore a little bit more of that, of that royalty path. But let's pick one. Let's pick one and kind of run with it.

Do you feel like the royalty is recognizable? But it's not just that people who go down that path are trying to be famous or be known. It has a lot to do, I think, with control of your own business, because it's building something that, that works for you and that fits your personality standards. What do you feel like the hardest things are for people to let go of when they decide? I'm going to let go of the, the royalty path a little bit.

Yeah, this. So this just happened to me recently, so it is fresh in my mind. And you're right, the dilemma might not be, hey, I want to be famous. But the question might be what types of clients do I want to work with? So let me bring it back a little bit to professional services. If, if the founders and what I often find too, if there's multiple founders, there's, there's very clearly a divide. One might feel one way, the other way. Do we want to charge less so that more people can go go on to our systems? We need to build efficiencies and processes for that or do we want to charge as much as possible? We're going to work with bigger and bigger companies. So this is actually happening right now. And we're unfortunately, we're stuck kind of in between the two. We're in a similar process. Matt, I think you and I have, have found this path as an agency. We're, we've made the decision to become more of a holding agency with multiple brands so that we can be both. So that we can have a brand that is royalty focused and a brand that is rich focused.

Yeah, we say you have to pick a path, but. But we didn't.

Yeah, we didn't. I'm creating multiple paths for multiple people. So I'm trying to have multiple people run the different paths.

Let's come back to that because I think from a brand standpoint, what you're saying is, is clarifying because you can't be both in one company, but you as a person might be able to have two offerings. What's really hard is to offer that low cost for everybody thing over here and be known for that. And then also try to offer a premium service where you really can charge top dollar because it affects how people perceive you, it affects your processes. There's a lot of downstream things, right?

Yeah. If you're a Toyota versus a Rolls Royce, I mean, these are very different brands. And if Rolls Royce all of a sudden came out with a $15,000 car, we would kind of raise our eyebrows and go, they've certainly made sacrifices to what we believe and know about their brand. Whereas if Toyota came out with a half a million dollar car, we'd say, why is it half a million? Like there's.

Why is it a Toyota?

Yeah, why is it a Toyota? It's just a, there's, there's a struggle there.

Right.

So I from. We're brand guys, so we know how to build separate brands that might address each of these issues. I don't recommend this for everybody. I don't think accountants necessarily. I mean, you may have an outlier accountant who like really understands this very well and may create kind of sub brands. And actually there are several financial service professionals that we're working with that have the, the audits, the tax returns. They're doing that as kind of a churn, you know, volume play, right where. And then they're picking up, consulting that, wow, I like doing this. This is kind of an interesting area. The thing that we're recommending to them is maybe this is a sub brand. Maybe we create kind of a signature brand for this so that there's not confusion around these two. Because you're going to run into some of the challenges that we talked about and we're doing the same thing. This is. So that's the story that I was telling earlier is we just wrote a proposal, the largest proposal that we've wrote in five years. It's 10 times larger than our, quote, unquote, normal smaller proposals. And in the last year, we've created a small package for clients. So the sales process is 10 times longer. I've been on 10 times more calls. The price, the value is 10 times higher. The stress is a little higher. Right, but so what's better? Do we want more six, seven figure deals or do we want a greater volume of the smaller deals? I just was on a call with a small one of the small deals. These questions are super easy. It's a lot less stress. We can turn these around very, very quickly. They're going to go, all right, and maybe a couple, one or two of Them might not go that well. Well, we don't lose a tremendous amount of money.

Right.

But if we, if we don't achieve, if we don't fulfill on this big client successfully, then that is a huge detriment to our revenue and our reviews and there's, there's lots of repercussions for that. So fundamentally, like it may not be do you want to be famous? But it's what types of clients do I want to work with? And you're going to find, if you have multiple founders, you're going to find a fight a little bit. When you're aligned, there's kind of a clarity around how you message, how you brand, what you say, how your systems are developed. They're all very different.

With accounting firms, one of the big questions a lot of them have is around whether they should be a generalist firm that works with lots of different types of clients, just small businesses in general. I think we run into that in the same way in the creative industry. Or should they have a niche or a real tight target market. Do you feel like there is there overlap here between making this, this decision of rich versus royalty, niche versus generalist? Where, where do you see those things kind of line up or, or not line up?

Yeah, absolutely. I think if you are a brand firm, you have a little bit more potential to create sub brands because it's, it's in your forte, but you probably do as much as we do. And this is every great, every great marketing and branding and positioning professional on the planet would say pick a niche, you know, follow that niche, love it, live in it, you know, spend your time there. Niching is better than not niching for sure. I love the, there's riches are in the niches. Find a niche or find a ditch. We, we, we promote that all the time, but we don't, we don't practice it because I think in our world we can create sub brands and niche into those, those specific categories. A whole different conversation for a different day potentially. But for, for the richer royalty path, I think rich riches are in the niches. So if you, if you go the rich path, you're going the systems path, the niche path may feel a little bit boring, but it's definitely where you make more money. 100% the royalty path, if you become the, the generalist, the name the doctor of blah, blah, blah, you can work in really any sector, people are going to seek you out and find you and you want to be that type of person. And in professional services you can be a little Bit more generalist. You can charge more that that's kind of the nature of that path. So yeah, that's, that's where I would recommend.

How much do you think making this choice is happening at a personal level for the owner versus at a systems or a company level for the firm? I know a lot of owning a business is, I would say personal work, like understanding yourself and making choices that sometimes go against maybe your own intuition or your own personality. But when you say you can do rich or royalty, are you saying you're making a choice as a firm or are you really saying you're making a choice as a person?

Wow, that's such a good question. I think if you frame that question the same way that you would answer that really for any decision in the business.

Right.

Where do you want to grow ultimately? Like how big do you ultimately want to be? Where do you want to be? Are you going to be virtual? Are you going to be in person? Are you going to. What is the uniqueness of the business? I think those stem, the kernel of it is from the founders, they're from the entrepreneur.

Right.

Or if they're not, you're probably in a franchise which has already figured out all the systems and it's a textbook and you're just going to go run with it, which is fine. That's great. So, and by the way, France, all franchises are rich. Rich path right there. They've made the decision for you. You're not getting famous running. Maybe you get famous if you run a hundred franchises. But that path. And are they business owners? 100%? Yes, they're absolutely business owners. They're absolutely, you know, systems thinkers. They're absolutely entrepreneurs in their own right. They're not founders, creators, innovators by nature.

Right.

So I think it does stem from the individual and really what the market means, I guess.

Yeah. So with a lot of accounting firms, actually a lot of accounting firm owners, they tend to be, they're technicians, accountants, math guys, logic and systems. They love all that stuff. As a marketer, when I'm working with them a lot of times one of the challenges is accounting is it's a trust based business. And so people want to buy from people, they want to know who they're working with. It's not just a nameless or a faceless company, the person behind it matters. And so we found that a lot of firms can get a lot more success in their marketing when there's a person. Usually it's a founder or a partner in the firm who can kind of be the face of the firm. So riches are in the niches. But often, usually there has to be a person that is an expert, the subject matter expert. In that space. You both be the face of your company and be on the rich path. Or is that the decision that you're making?

You don't need the person necessarily to be the subject matter expert. I think the content speaks louder than the, the, the individual you really need. And if it's going to be an individual, it's going to be a person. That person needs to be at everything. They need to be the face. They need to be on social media, they need to be speaking at things, you know, at least signing off on blog posts and things, articles that are, that are being written. And I'm going to argue that is the royalty path, right? Even even though you've niched down that you're, you're on the royalty path there. So the, the rich path, if you're niching down, I think is really around, hey, this is content that is really important and valuable for this specific thing. We know it really well. Look at all of our clients. You can do that from a broader kind of company perspective and systems perspective. I don't think you necessarily need to have the person. And I come back to the question at hand is what kind of clients do we want to work with? We want to work with bigger and bigger clients. We're going to always tear up into bigger and bigger clients. If that's the mentality, that's the heart, then that's the royalty path. Hey, we want to build the system that everybody can jump onto. In fact, we're going to build technology around that. We're going to make it even more streamlined. We're going to make it easier and easier and we're going to crush our competition because this is something completely different than what people have seen out there. That is, that is a rich path. That's a mentality shift a little bit. And who you have as the, as a leader for that may not determine the path.

And I think I could get behind that. I love it when people disagree. I think that the best ideas come through kind of poking at them and trying to find out what are the holes in this thing rather than just assuming that it, that it is right or that you're right about anything in particular. The biggest challenge that I've seen or the mistake I've seen is firm owners thinking they can, they can outsource that expertise to a marketing copywriter. Or when you say the, the quality of the content has to be as high, I think, as, as if it was coming from the subject matter expert, even if they're not the face of it in most cases. And maybe we don't agree totally on that as well. Probably the, the bigger thing is just I've seen such, especially in the age of AI, there's such, there's such volume of really bad content or low quality stuff advice out there that you can't. The assumption isn't if you go down the rich path, you can commoditize and you can just use subpar content or streamlined systems that just are about like production, production, production.

Right.

So the goal of this, one of the chapters will be fallacies. And the fallacy is that one path is less excellent. I think you have to have a high level of excellence for success in either path. You cannot go down the rich path and take shortcuts and build systems that are going to fall apart for the next person. Imagine going to a. Would five guys have ever gone there if they didn't have these really unique systems? These like really like all those systems kind of pristine and done properly and well for all this, the 15th franchise and the hundredth franchise. No, absolutely not. You need to be excellent in that.

Right.

So. And can you go the, can you go the royalty path and you can actually fail more often? Probably in the royalty path, less so in the rich path. So that's kind of a shift in the, in the mentality in these two.

Okay, give us some. So listeners, they're sitting here and they're wondering what path am I on right now? Because I think sometimes people don't realize which one they are. What, what are the sorts of questions that you ask? Or how would you know, am I, am I doing, do I want to be rich? But I'm really acting on the royalty path right now. I think that's, that's probably the biggest question for me that I've always had. The things that I've recognized is, oh, that's king behavior right there. And really I want to be on this other path.

Yeah, here's a few litmus questions is this one's really, this, this one cuts to the heart. Well, let me go, let me go to some easy ones. I think that question, what kind of clients we want to work with, is it bigger and bigger? Is it less and less? That's a really key one. It's not easy to answer. But you have a gut if you say it. Propose that question first you go, oh, I do want to work with bigger and Bigger clients. Why is that? The end goal there is for you to be this big firm that works with big clients. That's it. You're not building systems for. Are there more of those folks? No, there's fewer of those folks. So you need to be better and better and better. So here's something that cuts to the heart. And as marketing, marketing professionals, we're always looking for this. What makes you unique. So if you're an accounting firm and you do the same thing as every other accounting firm, that is going to be really hard to be in the royalty path.

Right.

You're just not going to get there. It's going to be hard to succeed on either path, to be honest. So trying to find some uniqueness in your processes or your system. So where is your most unique thing? Is it the processes and systems? Is it. So five guys, for example. I love five guys. Peanuts, you know, in the. Free peanuts in the line. That's like really? No, there weren't a lot of companies that were doing that. Free toppings.

Right.

They were one of the first with like fresh never frozen. You know that, that kind of mindset, super reduced menu. It's like five things on the menu. Then they can do like secret menu items. So it was a little bit of like the east coast version of the in and out play. But they, they kind of threw their flare on top of it and In n out didn't want to go to east coast originally. So anyway, so there's kind of a story in the, in the background there. But if your uniqueness is, hey, I've got these great ideas and this person has this, that subject matter expert. We happen to have that person here that feels more royalty side.

Right.

So those are kind of the couple litmus things. Another one is, here's a few, like, quick, I'll rattle off some specialty versus scale. Are we going to specialize in that uniqueness? Great books around that. Seth Godin's Purple Cow, Marty Neumar, Zag. Basically every great positioning marketing person talks about that specialty brand, building the brand. How important is your brand name versus how willing are you to white label?

Right.

So if you, if you're more open to white label, like I just give me the. Do give me the money. Like if, if I'm willing to take money and I'm willing to do it underneath a different brand. Yeah, that's rich path.

Right.

It's not quite royalty path.

I was just reading an article this week about Kirkland. So Costco's clothing brand was a $9 billion sales last year. That is more than Levi Strauss. You know who makes their clothes for Kirkland, Levi Strauss. Costco I think is a great example of trying to be systems rich, making specific. They do have a brand and they have Kirkland and other things underneath it. But it's not, they're not trying to be prestigious. They're trying. But they've got a great business model.

Obviously a little bit of their history too because they certainly went down the rich path and they're curving back in into royalty trying to develop brands for themselves. Amazon is on that same path. I just said Jeff Bezos really focused on being rich converging, right? Yeah. He himself went the royalty path certainly with Blue Origin and some of these other, you know, different, different side gigs that he's got going on.

Yeah.

But you can see Amazon creating their own Amazon private label sort of, sort of deal and their everyday items.

Right.

That those are. They're building their own brand for their products now. Amazon has some credibility within their brand and it's not just a vanilla place that you go. I believe in Amazon. I have brand feelings about Amazon. So now that's going to be a very good reason to start to develop your own brands around that.

I think we probably have a tendency to over index what success looks like based on the, the royalty personalities that we see out there and, and even at smaller levels. Whenever you see all these people on, on Twitter or or wherever else talking about these, these founders and their success stories and you see a lot less written about the average millionaire owns a landscaping business. There's a lot of these folks who have, who figured out boring businesses. Is kind of a fun interesting. Yeah it's trending now but there's a lot of rich people with boring businesses that have gone down that path. But instead we tend to be drawn towards these unicorn unique situations that are probably based more on luck or survivor bias and all these things that are kings that are royalty type personalities who have succeeded. But that's not the most common way I would say to success 100%.

Like I said, it's 1% of 1%. Go through the Inc 5000 and see how many from top down you recognize. They start to go away very quickly. And even the ones you recognize. Tell me the CEO's name, tell me the, tell me the founder's name. It's going to be very hard to do it across the board. You might recognize five, five names, ten names on that list and then go to go to the number 5,000. I think even 5,000. You have you have companies making hundreds of millions of dollars.

Right.

So those companies like I'd love to get our business to 100 million. That'd be fantastic. What's more important that we do that through my own personal brand or we do that through systems. And like I think I'm more on the rich side certainly. Here's a, here's kind of a quick maybe as we're wrapping up. I'll share with you one of the really interesting kind of personal philosophical tests. If you have a wad of cash in your, in your wallet you have a money clip, do you put smaller bills on the outside or the larger bills on the outside?

I put the larger builds. I personally I put the larger bills on the outside.

Why is that?

Yeah, I don't know why is that James?

I I think kind of fun psychologically fundamentally like I want to show that I have more money in my stack.

Right.

The better answer what you should do if you don't care about that that view is put smaller bills on the outside so it looks like a smaller.

Right.

Who has more money in that stack? It doesn't matter what's on the outside. What matters like how much money is in that stack. So there's kind of a. Maybe your listeners are looking at their own wallets going oh what did I just how did I, how did I set up my own wallet? Is it more practical or is it more for. Is it in a thousand dollar wallet? I spend more on my wallet than I have cash in it. There's. That's kind of an interesting play to, to think about. But the ramifications that this has the fork in the road when you decide properly makes so many decisions easier and easier the further you go down in on the entrepreneurial journey.

Well to bring it back just to, to accounting firms I think a really a really easy thing to think about is in your firm. I feel like so the generalist and the niche decision is a big one. The other big one is do you want to start offering more of those like fractional CFO type services? That's kind of the bigger and bigger. If you go down that route I don't think the right answer is I want to do fractional CFO work for more and more and more and more clients. That's a recipe for burnout and not real riches. That is the royalty route. You want to be working with a few clients and you tend to be the core of your business. The other direction is accounting services. The like subscription model type stuff. The monthly bench.com yeah, yeah, all of those sorts of things. That's the, that's the other direction. But I do see a lot of firms trying to do both. They want to grow this big base of like more and more and more and they're offering these fractional CFO services. And my guess is that in a lot of cases the owner, the founder, whoever has to be that CFO person is feeling really stretched because they're trying to do both of these things at the same time. And they might be well served either by splitting those into somewhat separate brands and offerings or choosing a direction and say, hey, we're going to go all in. Because I do think the fractional CFO route, there's a lot of opportunity there. But you have to build a business that fits around your life, which is a royalty pack, functions that in order for that to be sustainable or you got to make it so that you're managing systems and team and leadership, which is going to be this other rich path. So I don't know. That seems to be one of the most maybe pressing questions for a lot of accounting firms is which, which direction you want to go. It's a person question, it's a founder question, I think.

Totally. Yeah. There's. Let me, let me add kind of two to three notes here. It's interesting, not quite a debate, but worthy for discussion. We two years ago launched. I've been dreaming about how to, how to build a smaller program for years because I'm on the rich path. That's how I built. And so I want to build systems that, that people, more and more people can gravitate towards. And we're lucky we did that because at the beginning of this year it was really helpful to have affordable programs. We call ours the fractional Seymour program though, because we've developed a model for how small slice of strategy plus a production team and some pre existing scalable materials can really deliver a tremendous amount of value. So don't pigeonhole into saying that that one model has to be this way.

Right.

Because we've taken that classic royalty path of fractional expert and turned it into a very scalable system.

But I'm assuming you, you're not the fractional CMO in all cases.

Not all cases, no, no. But we built the system for it for sure. But that's, I mean, if you want to build a model like that, then you can, you need to be able to have other folks that are working.

You have a personal ceiling. Everybody does.

Everybody does, yeah. The other thing that I would say is, and this is a shortcoming. I want. I have a lot of ideas. I want to do a lot of things. And so. And we built.

We're.

We've built finally a system for that to happen easier. We built a core system. We call it the Figments Mothership. And then out of the mothership, we have sub brands that focus on niches and focus on specific offerings. Similar to Matt, I think you're. You're in that similar process. What I found that we need to have. And if this is what I would recommend for your accounting companies and anybody who's listening, if your desire is. I really, I really want both. I really. I have a unique perspective and I want to build out these systems or we have this technology that we want. We want to trial out and we want to build sub brands for each of these. You have to have a champion on both. You have to have somebody who lives and breathes and thinks about that. That thing. It is very difficult to live and breathe for. For both. Even Elon Musk with multiple amazing brands out there, he has incredible teams whose sole responsibility. And he's not the CEO of every. Every company, but he's the. The visionary.

Right.

Of many of those companies. The person who's actually running things, who's the champion, who puts it on their shoulders and runs with it and cares about just. That is so necessary.

You.

We've built. I think we've built probably like a couple dozen brands over. Over the last 10 years and many of them have not survived because they did not have champions.

Well, James, this has been a fascinating conversation and I'm sure we could keep talking about it. One of the reasons I wanted to have you on the show is that you and I talked in person about this and I started to. This idea would come up in my conversations and I. It's not mine. I didn't want to like steal it from you. I am anticipating. When is the book actually going to be coming out?

Because I feel this deserves the advent of AI hopefully sooner than it was going to be. Hoping to have the outline and initial packets ready by early next year, but we are before then trying to run some. Some private sessions, some individual coaching around this particular topic. And so if anybody does have interest, please let me know. I'd love to get you into kind of a pilot beta core group of beta users who can give me feedback.

Where can people find you? Who are you looking to connect with? What are the right types of folks that you.

Sure. Yeah. So we'd love to help out on the. On the marketing front on marketing side of things. If you are looking for a fractional SEMA who can help out on a on a small level and get get your marketing off the ground for less than the cost of having a part time person that is that's easy for us and you can find us on figmints F I G M I n t s.com fig like the fruit mints like the candy and yeah on LinkedIn also anywhere out there I usually respond pretty quick.

Very good. Well James Kwan. Find him on LinkedIn. Figments is the company we'll be following your thought. We'll call it Thought Leadership in this area and watching for that book. But thank you for being on the show. You can find me on LinkedIn as well, Matt Banker or you can find us at marketingforaccountingfirms.com this has been another episode of the Marketing for Accounting Firms podcast and we hope you have a great day. We'll leave it there. Thanks. This podcast, Marketing for Accounting Firms, is brought to you by Benchmark Growth Marketing, a marketing agency that helps accounting firms get more calls booked through their website. You can find a set benchmark growth marketing. Com connect with me Matt Banker on LinkedIn.