Benchmarking your Business with Ben Day

Welcome to Accountants Law Pod, where accounting professionals and law firms converge, hosted by Linda Artesani, Sarah Prevost, and Steven Libhart.

Welcome back to the podcast, everyone, and we are really excited, like we can hardly contain ourselves, because we have a show called Benchmarking and we have a special guest. His name is Ben Day, and I actually think I'm going to let Steve do the intro because there's no way you could do it justice yourself, Ben, like Steve will for you. So go ahead, Steve.

Well, thank you, Linda. Ben, welcome to our podcast. We are so excited to have you here today. Um, I know Ben maybe, what, 3 or 4 years now through an association that we belong to. And I went to a couple of conventions and I'd sit and watch him getting ready to go up on stage and talk and share his wisdom with us. And then As time went on, I was at a retreat last fall with a bunch of bookkeepers up in Winter Park, and I learned about a session that Ben was doing, a course that he was doing, and I took the course. And I just have to say it was life-changing for me, for our business. And I have to compliment and say that the 3 people who have made a huge difference for me and my business are right here in this podcast today. And so my heart is full. I still subscribe to Ben's Weekly Rhythm. He's in the real estate business. So much of what he does is applicable to what we do in the legal business. And Ben, we, we deal with a lot of people with the imposter syndrome just because they're dealing with attorneys and they're scared half to death, but they are drawn to the magic of working with the law. And so many of your systems have made a difference for my team and I. And and how we do our our interactions with our legal clients, and how we track things, and how we get everything done. And so, Ben Day, welcome to our podcast.

I'm so proud you're here, man, and I'm just thrilled. I'm tickled. I'm honored. I'm excited. And we we were doing a little crosstalk before. I truly had no idea what I was gonna do. Well, you you invited me on. I'm like, cool. I can come on and just yammer on. And then I started listening to what you guys are doing and watching your stuff, and. like, where— what more could I bring up? Even in your most recent stuff, I'm like, I feel like I— this was the conversation I thought I was gonna have. I guess not anymore. And so I'm really excited to be here. You guys are all brilliant. And I'm happy to just overshare whatever I've got with you today. So I'm just excited, man.

That's awesome. And authenticity is where we're at in our lives, just being us. So I love that because It'll be a nice, a nice conversation for sure. So where should we start? Should we talk about some of the metrics that—

What could we maybe have Ben tell us about his business first and where you were a few years ago and how you got where you're at today? That's huge.

Yeah, that's 100%. Absolutely. So hi, I'm Ben Day and I turned 30 a month ago. And so I'm no longer a young man, but like I was a month ago. 2 months ago, I fell off a ladder and broke my leg. I had a floppy shin. I won't go into the details, but it was the worst. And so now I'm relearning to walk and I've got a rod in my leg and I'm doing the things. And I was really blessed over the last 2 months. So I broke my leg on May 6th. I was out of surgery, back at home on May 8th. And I, between the, the pain meds and the general bleh of that experience, worked a grand total of like 4 hours in the bookkeeping business in May and in June. And when I came back, it kind of was getting back into it in July. Everything was okay. It was just fine. And that's, that's kind of where we're at today. Now, I started this business in 2017. And it was an absolute grind. It was the late nights. It's the trying to pick your niche. It's like I was 23, and so it's not like I had any— like my work experience was bartending before this. So I don't know what HR is. I didn't know anything. I'm not a CPA. I don't have any experience at all. And I really kind of struggled through that, found my groove, found my footing, and scaled it up. And we went LionShare went from kind of a generalist, sort of, kind of, but we like real estate firm to— LionShare today has worked with hundreds of real estate businesses. We've got, I think, half a billion in assets under bookkeeping right now, if you want to be really financially stupid about it. We've got, we've got a ton of bookkeeping going on. We serve exclusively real estate businesses in different verticals that we can talk about. That's our Like procedures are built out and all of our metrics and everything. And when I, when I break my leg, it's like nothing happens. I'm as close to removed, I think, as I can get without hiring salespeople or hiring a replacement for me. And I don't even know what that person would do. And so we've come a very, very long way in 7 years. And I am just so, so grateful for, for all the lessons and stuff that I learned along the way. And so that's me. And then about last year I was like, hey, you know what? I think I'm smart enough that I could probably tell 1 or 2 people and show 1 or 2 people how I did this, see if I can help empower some other bookkeeping CEOs. And that's where coaching came from. I started Built by Bookkeepers and we've got some cool stuff that we do over there, just helping empower bookkeeping CEOs.

Way cool stuff.

Really specifically bookkeeping CEOs to be a better boss. So what does it mean to be a boss and how do you hire and what do you need to change in that process? And we just, we cover the gamut there and that's, That's, that's me. There you go. That's, that's the, that's the very long intro.

Man, you're doing a good one.

I think we're sold because you had 2 months out of work and your business still kept running and you didn't skip a beat. I mean, that's proof positive right there because I don't know, Sarah, if we both fell off the ladder together, I don't know how well we would do without us being there. So it's interesting.

I love it. I know that probably for anybody listening, That's the dream. The hard work that's not really discussed, but like you said, it was a grind in the beginning. You had that mental shift. You drove the vehicle in the way that you wanted to drive. That right there, that's the work I feel like we're in the middle of ourselves. I mean, Steve as well, just to be full disclosure. But Linda, I completely agree. And I love to hear that you're the person that has Done that, though. Like, it's not— you're not the figurehead that's removed yourself so much, you know what I mean? Like, you're in it, so you know those feelings and those emotions that go with it at such a young age. I mean, Jesus, that's very young. That's pretty awesome.

Amazing job at empowering his team.

Yeah.

Giving them permission to do their thing, giving them the tools to do their thing. And having everything on the back end to monitor it and coach and encourage and get it done. He's just amazing. And I'm hoping you'll share some of that today, Ben.

That's awesome. That's— I mean, Steve, I think I love that.

Hard road to go down. And he did it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, and I feel like there's a lot of conversation, Ben, if we hear it right now in Growth, growth, growth, growth, growth. What is that exactly? Is it growth of people? Is it growth of clients? What are we measuring? I feel like it's the measure of the value of something like you just said that happened. Sorry that accident happened to you. Jesus.

Thank you. Yes. Not in the cards. Not what I had for 2023. Right.

But to me, the measure of value and that I don't even like using the work-life balance, but the measure of value of what it is that we're living in every day. That's beautiful right there that you've created this, what I call my dream.

Well, thank you. And yeah, look, and I don't— I just— there is a moment in the middle of lockdown, lockdown part 1, right, where the business was not going well. And I had to do some really personal, just soul searching of like, What am I doing? Because this sucks right now and I don't know how to get out of it. And I just, I really ended— I caught myself in this just very 100% depressed downward spiral in the business. I think it was, I'd like looked up one day, it was like a Thursday and I hadn't done anything all week. I was just sitting in this office sweating. For no reason. Like, not, not a— I kid you not, not a thing got done that week on my end just because I was crammed up by just junk and negativity. And at that point it was like, all right, I got to, I got to anchor myself to something, right? If we're going to, if we're going to perform, I got to really shift what's going on. And that something just really simply became gratitude. And it was like, man, I could be like out of work, out of work right now. I could, I could not have a business at all. I know that this sucks right now, like full on.

Mm-hmm.

But if this disappeared, even just the skill sets and the lessons that I have right now, I can go and do something else. And so let's stop being mean to ourselves, embrace a little gratitude, and try to use that to kickstart some momentum. And that has yet to steer me wrong when things get weird. It's like, man, what do you have right now? I've got a business that can And that's, and that's honestly when I fell, when I fell off the ladder, I was so mad. And then I was immediately, immediately so at peace. As soon as I made it to the hospital, I was like, everything's going to be fine. I know I've got cash, I've got insurance because my business has insurance. I've got cash in the bank because I'm good at what I do. I don't have to email up my boss somewhere and be like, hey, silly me, I need as much time off as I can get. That's not, that's not my reality. So I need to just not be stressed about this and be really grateful. And that really carried me in ways I can't describe. Like, I'm so blessed, so grateful is really just where I try to live every day.

That's something that— I mean, I studied yoga and I was a yoga teacher, and I can tell you that we did gratitude journals. Even if you just get up in the morning and just for 5 minutes think of everything you're grateful for, and it doesn't have to be a person, it can be any little thing. And it can shift your perspective. Last year, I went through the hurricane where it flooded my house. It flooded, it ruined all our rental properties down here. None of them are rented right now. There's still no electricity almost a full year later. And we're just sitting with this unrented property. And I just look at what I had. I still have a beautiful home and I had to move out and we had to move out. A lot of our stuff got taken out. But I kept saying to myself, it's stuff. It's stuff. And on the other side of this, it's going to be better. And if you keep that glass is half full attitude, I think— and it's not like that every day, though. I mean, there was ups and downs. Believe me, I'm not going to sit here and say, oh, I woke up and meditated and everything was great every day. It wasn't. And just like that in COVID, it wasn't like that for all of us. And it was like a part of us figuring it out and then a part of us were affected in different ways. And I think that bit of just taking gratitude and trying not to go down the old poor me, which I know I did multiple times, but I kept coming out of it because I felt like it made me stronger. And things happen for a reason. And my mother always says that everything happens for a reason. And that reason, maybe something good is gonna come out of it too. So I think that that's a big thing to think about when you're in business and in life in general.

Oh man, you touched on a few things. I mean, I'm a little bit teared up because honestly, my life, Linda has lived through it and so has Steve a bit. My life drastically shifted a year ago. But we come out on the other side, and it's the value of life. It's the gratitude for it. And I, I completely agree. And I do feel like a different person on this other end of it. And I have— my business has shifted in a positive way. Linda and I have really gone through a whole evolution, I feel, in a change. And thank God we have each other for that. But also, I I just value the change of what has this road looked like. And it was scary. It was— I will not lie. It was definitely the life-death moment. It was right in front of you. Takes you out. I mean, mind you, I had 2 weeks of chaos, but I was out and I had everyone else around us. supporting and helping. So I think that it's kind of like what you've built and the value of what you've built in talking into the details of it is those systems. How do you even start? Where do you make that? It's also a mind shift, like you said. I feel like it's a mind shift change first before it's a system change first, right?

Oh, yeah, 100%. And I was trying to figure out how to segue this in, and you've just given it to me on a silver So, I'm sitting in this office, right? And I'm like, okay, what am I going to do? Gratitude. And I'm realizing that it's like, man, I'm down and out. Like, I hear like this makes sense in my brain. How am I going to drive this home for me? What can I do to make this a constant thing? And then I remembered every motivational poster I've ever seen in my life, and you guys have seen these. They're all over. Like your Bed Bath and Beyond, not anymore, but like they're all over your your your retail stores, and it and it and it is like live laugh love. Like that's the one that you just could not escape, still can't escape it. And for a long time, I was like these are so stupid. I will never have something like this in any home that I live in. Why would you? Who who needs that? Who needs that kind of thing around? I kid. I right now you can see it. I have a live laugh love little dumb little sign in my. background, right? Oh, exactly. Exactly right. It's the— I love these journals you're showing right now. It's so, it's so important. And for me, how this, how this segues right into the growth and the systems and the mindset is, number one, you're not too good for live, laugh, love. Like, everybody needs— like, there is a bedrock that you're going to hit, and it's like, you'll take support wherever you can get it. So I want you to get as gimmicky as possible with it, right? Like, if it seems a little stupid, whether it's Like, I know a lot of people push back on journaling. And so like a gratitude journal, squishy, I'm better than that. No, you're not. Nobody's better than that, right? Lean into it. It's there for a reason. It helps. And the gimmicks are what has grown into— and this is an excellent example— the gimmicks are what have grown into how I empower my team and how we begin to build systems around that.

Yeah.

And I've got a great example. It's very timely for us right now. It won't be for when this releases. I'm pretty sure today, August 2nd, is the release day for the new blockbuster movie, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem.

I think you're right.

I think it is today. I know that I'm right. I know that I'm right.

Okay. I love it.

So, so, and the reason I bring this up is because we're like gimmicks. Empowerment? How do we get performance, especially out of your team?

Right.

And there's, there's a ton of soft skills out there, right? You've got Enneagram, StrengthsFinders, and the DiSC profile, all these things. And I'm like, okay, I'm going to learn this. I'm going to empower myself so I can be better with clients and better at sales, better at leadership. But my teams also need to be better at leadership and better at client relationships. And sometimes you get clients that are a little ornery and you're like, how do I deal with that? And I'm doing all this personal development to deal with this person. How do I quickly give years of that experience to a team member? Yeah, Heroes in a Half Shell, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. So what we do in our, in our onboarding with our team is I say, hey, you can go learn about the DiSC if you want to learn about DiSC profile. DiSC profile has 4 dominant features. Just for anybody who doesn't know, it's— you're either—

Did this in your weekly rhythm this week.

I just did it. Yeah. And I'm diehard about this. DiSC is Dominant, influential, like steady, I think, or conscientious. And it is— and these— it's these 4 dominant personality types. If you are a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fan, it's pretty easy to map these 4 dominant personality types to these 4 silly little cartoon characters. And so I'm buying my team and whoever they want to take with them movie tickets To Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles this week because I've talked about this so often. They're like, "This is so dumb," but I get it because I'm gonna get on. I'm gonna get on a call with somebody that's a high D personality. That's very direct, has no time to waste, hates your small talk, will cut you off. And if you will just shift your perspective a little bit to oh, this person's a this person's a Raphael. He's a little mean red turtle, but he's not mean. He's just very to the point. Like, the whole perspective shifts.

I was gonna say that.

Sarah, what's the name of that one again?

Raphael.

Raphael.

Raphael. Your new name is Sarah Raphael Prevost.

Here's the best thing. My brother-in-law is Raphael, his name, and I call him Raph. And I've always loved Raph in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. So, and I've, I've learned the skill. Let me just say that I've learned my voice needed to be heard. I needed to be direct, and that's how I speak. So yeah, thank you all for confirming me.

Dude, it's my pleasure. And there's no— right, and there's nothing— the point is there's nothing wrong with that. You're delightful, right? Direct people are excellent. And we were— Steve and I work with a ton of very direct people just as bookkeepers, not even as attorneys or real estate people or whatever. You just gotta kind of like It's a shift. It's like you're like, oh, wait a minute, this has nothing to do with me. This is all you.

Exactly.

Yeah. How can I best cater to you? Because this is not going away.

You reframe it and you— yeah, I love it.

Yeah.

And now every time I get on a call with my team, my team's like, hey, I've got a meeting this week. I'm like, hey, just remember they're a red turtle, so don't go in there with your lasagna recipe. Go in there with a pre-prepared P&L. And let's get to it. And then you could talk about lasagna when you're done, right?

Yeah.

I love that.

So, Ben, one of the things that I've always admired in working with you in the weekly rhythms that we watch and the course that I went through with you is how you explain things, how you visually explain things. And would you mind sharing and doing one of your charts and walking— do you guys— this is so amazing. And when you do this with your team, It creates that infectious atmosphere where they're doing the same thing. We've got somebody on our team who loves the way you chart. I shared it with her, and now she sits down, she sits in the background when we do a consultation, and she's preparing that chart. And when it's done, within a half hour, the client has it. It's amazing. So I'm going to be quiet and let you go.

Of course. Well, so— This is a podcast, Steve, so we have to kind of describe it too.

Correct.

Yes.

Or they could go to YouTube and watch us all.

There you go. Yeah.

Yes.

If you are— I'm going to do my best to visually describe a bunch of boxes and lines. But yes, go to the YouTube. I'm happy to share my screen if somebody would turn on the ability for me to do that. We can make this happen.

Our lovely Ciara behind the curtain, honey.

I'll tell you, for a visual person, when he does this, it just all makes sense and it takes you where you need to go and you've got your notes and you've got the plan and It's amazing. Yeah.

Well, and again, it kind of comes back to— for me, I'm going to share this and talk through it— bookkeepers and professionals at large, right? If you work in a professional services industry, you're just a smart cookie. You just have to be. There's a lot of information rolling around in your brain that you hold on to at the same time. And as it turns out, if somebody is hiring you, it's probably because that's not their dominant skill set as well. They probably live in a different realm than that, and they're hoping that you are going to bring that structure. And so you can, but then there's a disconnect. There's kind of a lack of trust at some point if you mishandle it. So I was like, okay, how can I really quickly use some learning or teaching tools to bridge that gap? And so what I— I'm sharing my screen right now. This has nothing to do with bookkeeping whatsoever. We're changing up our coaching, uh, our coaching website right now. And so all I have right now is me having diagrammed out, okay, here's the different pieces that we need to have by page. And it's like, hey, how do I feel about these pages? And like, do we have all of these pages? Do we need to go build them out? Do we need to change them? What's going on? And just by really quickly— so, and if you want to go and do this again, if you're listening to this only, I'm so sorry. If you want to begin to diagram things out for free, it's technically it's diagrams.net, but I will Google draw.io. And it'll take me right there. And you can create a new diagram. It saves itself inside your Google Drive and you can begin to just quickly document.

So powerful.

Whatever you've got going on.

And we'll put a link to that in the show notes too.

100%. And it's, and it's totally free. You don't have to spend money on this.

Yeah.

Like it's, this is just part, this is like the unsung hero of G Suite services because I'm pretty sure Google owns part of this, right? But you can begin to do any kind of stuff and you can begin to say, okay, like what? Like I've got a person, right? So like, let's say, you know, hey, here's, here's our client. The client's giving us information like receipts. Now what do we do with that? Where does this go? And begin to outline your process. And then you can sit down with your whole process, however many steps it is in this outline, and say, where are we breaking down?

What's— What's— you can turn this into your SOP.

100%. Yeah. And we've got, we've got pictures like this everywhere.

We find this is really beneficial. We use Lucidchart, which we pay for, but maybe we won't keep using. But we map out because we put a lot of people, we take them out of an antiquated system and we move them into a modern system. And then there's a lot of different working parts that they're not accustomed to. So we visually diagram this out for them so they know how the pieces all work together. And you can almost see their lightbulb moment when you, you know, produce this And part of the training to show them that this is what it all— how it all works, because they know they're over here working in Dext, and they know that there's LeanLaw or Clio, and it goes into QuickBooks, and they're trying to understand how all this works. And they're coming maybe from desktop where they completely don't understand the difference of working in the cloud. So it helps them to understand how everything flows together. And I just always see a big difference in a client when we're training after we've given them the visual. It's huge.

Dude, I totally agree. We make— we bake— and I don't know if you guys do this or not, but we have so many clients, and rightfully so, that just like, they want to be smart, they want to understand the system. They don't necessarily want to use it, but they want to know enough about it to really understand what the capabilities are. And then they underuse it 90% of the time. But so we— so what we end up doing is we end up— we added an extra call to their onboarding process. And that call just is, hey, let's make sure your bank feeds are working and let me baby step you through not even your side of the process, but our side of the process. Here's what the backend of the portal looks like. Here's the different kinds of stuff we can do and really begin to build. It builds a little professionalism, a lot of transparency, begins to build that trust from the get-go immediately after the sale. And I've yet to have a client say like, hey, this was a waste of my time. You know, if anything, they ask more questions about it.

I can see where this could be really applicable with the difficult law firm when you're working on a trust reconciliation that has turned into a giant monster and you need to refocus the client and say, okay, here's where we— what we've done so far, here's where we need to go, and these are the steps, and this is— these are the things that are stopping us, these are the things where you're helping us, these are, you know, mapping it out visually just makes such a difference.

I don't know if you've had this happen. It happened to Linda and I. We were a little bit like, God, stop. Like, just struck by it. They literally held up the paper, printed it out, and said, where on the map are we?

Yeah, it was a multi-phase project.

It was a multi-phase project. And it was so funny because I was like, oh, that just affirms we were okay with our track. But I love the way you've got this. And if it could just be integrated in what we use, Building trust is important.

Building trust with the client. Let's face it, onboarding is very rocky. It never goes as smooth. I don't care how well you plan for it. Things happen and that can build frustration. So if you're completely transparent through the whole thing and you're like, Sarah's like, we're right here on the map, you know, that helps them understand because it is sometimes taking them from, you know, I couldn't log into the cloud and I restarted my computer and like, oh. Okay, let's start there. You don't have to restart your computer if you couldn't log into the cloud or whatever was not working right into the web-based product. Maybe you have to clear your cookies and cache, then you have to go into all what that is. But they have to understand how the systems work. And what's— and I still believe too, like, we work with bigger law firms. You need to let the girl that's doing the AR, the guy that's doing the AR piece, they need to know why the things that they're doing is important to the whole thing. They need to know the whole process. Just being one little, like, with blinders on it, the one process, it's better to have them understand. why it's so important to get these things done in certain timeframes for everybody else. And I think that that's another piece of the training that we have to go into.

Man, 100%. And I want to speak on this a little bit because I know you guys have got some folks dealing with like imposter syndrome or how do we build this and scale it, right? Whether it's just you or you're trying to get out of it and hand it off to a team member, right? Because what we know about building trust and working with teams that are in our office and not in our office, that's a lot of personality and it's all over the phone. And people would just— would you please just come to the office and why isn't this done? And they start treating you like an employee and nobody's patient, but then they don't give you the things that you need in order to finish the dadgum cleanup, right? And it just explodes. And so what we have, I'm still running sales. And so anytime I've got a prospect that's like, hey, how long is this cleanup going to take? I'm like, how fast are you going to get us the information? And some of them love that answer and some of them hate it. And so I'll lead with that, but then I'll say, listen, here's, here's what we want to do with this cleanup. I can't give you, I can't give you a timeline on this. I can't because, because here's why, right? Life happens, things happen. We may find a bigger mess once we get in here, but we're charging a flat rate. So you're getting what you're getting. And I'm a man of my word. We're going to follow this through. And if you really want this to get done fast, I need 30 minutes a week from you. Let's get on a call, same time, same place for 30 minutes once a week and do a status update. And you can see the portal, you can see what questions we have out for you, and you can ask us questions. And every week we're going to hold each other accountable to that. And kid you not, that gives the bookkeepers on my team and me all the kick in the pants that we need to make progress on this cleanup every week.

Mm-hmm.

Because then we got to show up with nothing in our hands. We're like, oh, we didn't do anything. But also it puts a ton of accountability and responsibility at the same time on this client who they've hired you and now they're like, oh, my problem solved. I don't have to think about this ever again. Meanwhile, you've got an ask list a mile long and we've really loved that. I cannot recommend that enough. Just a weekly touch base with the client.

We do that. That's nice to hear. Yeah, it's nice to hear that you're confirmed because we It got to a point where one person was like, every day it was just peppering, peppering. Hey, you know what? Save your questions. We'll meet you in a weekly session. You have 15 minutes. If you don't want to make the 15 minutes, courtesy of letting us know, but we'll be there. It's on our calendar. If you don't want to come, that's fine. If you don't show up, we'll send you our questions. That's okay too. I'm not heartbroken, but it's there. It's parked. It's a seat at the table for that week. And it will go on. And we sometimes on the onboarding, we'll do a duration and then we'll flip the switch. We'll say, okay, you're gonna move into a monthly or you're gonna move into a quarterly. And depending on— and I love that you brought this up because it does, it really drives the entire team on our side. It's like that false deadline, but it's a real deadline. It's like, you gotta work to this. I'm not showing up empty-handed. I'm the face. I'm not showing up With zero things in my hands. So.

Right. Yeah. It's like, how many times can you show up and say, oh, we're working on it until there's some frustration there? And rightfully so.

Right? Absolutely.

You discover a lot in those 30-minute calls that you didn't get in the, you know, the initial consult, or even digging into the file. They'll say something that you'd be like, oh, you didn't mention that. But I'm glad you told me that. Because now that's going to shift how we do X, because we weren't aware of this as something that you do. And You know, no matter how many times we, like I said, prepare and we have our little checklists and everything else. But for sure, like Sarah and I will do it. And I think that a lot of times when we sit with the client like that in that capacity of every, every week during onboarding, and the both of us do it together with the client, and it's typically 15 to 30 minutes. Sometimes it's shorter, sometimes it's long. We book in the 30. And I always see that the people who are really engaged and really wanna make things better, they're ready to make that move and make it a better system. And they actually enjoy— I think they enjoy coming on with us and talking to us and understanding everything that's happening too. They don't wanna be just sitting back going, ah, let them do it and it's all done. They actually wanna know. And is there what they'll ask us questions that might not have come out of a regular conversation, but if we're going through and they'll say, oh, I didn't know we could do that in accounts receivable.

Really?

I could actually automate some of that reminding the people about invoices that's in the system. We could set that up. And those are things that aren't actually thought of and may not have come up in an earlier conversation. So they're very As much as we get so bogged down with meetings, those meetings are just critical. They're critical for the success of the project for sure. Right.

And the success of the relationship too, right? I mean, it's every— and we've all been doing this long enough. I think that it's like, at some point, every new client breaks when their cleanup's not done. Hey, this has been going on for 2 weeks. Why is it— this is outrageous. And it's like, okay, well, let's set a little context. Or it's like 8 months. They're like, why is this taking so long? Well, We've had, you know, 27 weekly meetings on the calendar and you've skipped 20 of them. And all of my questions are sitting unanswered in the portal. I'm happy to keep showing up to this thing. What are, what are you going to do to flip this switch? Like, like flip the switch here, right? But on the flip side of that, if you are working with somebody like you're talking about dynamically, hey, we signed you up. We got you in here. You've got this weird thing that I've never seen before, but we're going to build this custom solution for you. We're going to document this process. I'm going to give you a cute little printout on how your very specific process should work. Suddenly you've got a raving fan and your bookkeeping process is now the best tool you have in your sales process. I'm like, this just, you know, the business writes itself and the growth that you were talking about earlier. That just is a natural product of just showing up and being good and honest and consistent.

You know, one of the things we shifted to too is we'll have somebody come. We already have a bookkeeper. We really don't need ongoing, but we just wanted to do this one project because the bookkeeper doesn't know how to undo this mess. Fine. And most people will be like, I don't want that. I just want to— I want the ongoing. But what you do is you take that job, you clean that up, you show them what you can do and how you do it, and You already got a clue there that that bookkeeper didn't know how to fix the mess. They don't have the same knowledge base that you do. So maybe you're not eliminating that bookkeeper's job that's on staff. And a lot of times that doesn't happen. They still stay on board in a different capacity, but we end up getting the work because now they see you can show off reporting and all these things that they never even considered. And now we've cleaned up the file. We know what we're talking about. We've demonstrated that throughout the whole job. And now they're like, you know, I don't want to take John's job away from him, but maybe can we work something out where, you know, John's actually a paralegal, by the way. He's not really a bookkeeper. So yeah, we'll just say, well, don't you think John's better served to be a paralegal? And then we can have him help us.

Yeah.

And then it just begins the job, but that becomes ongoing. But we never ever give— we learned this the hard way— where we would do, if somebody was looking for the, for the actual ongoing We used to do the project and give the ongoing price all in one contract. And then we just decided one day, let's see how this on this project goes, because if it ends up being that guy that doesn't show up to meetings, I don't wanna work with a client ongoing if they can't be that invested. So in fact, one of our team was like, do you want an ongoing price? I said, let's see how the project goes, see if we, we actually like this person, and then we'll go into that next phase. They're really excited about getting something cleaned up. Maybe they got to file a tax return still and they haven't done 2022, which is now the season of that. And then we'll see. And if we don't really like them, then we'll just like, gee, I don't think it's going to work.

Well, it gives us opportunity. Like you said, both of you have said this, like, what's behind it? We don't know what's behind it till we get into it. Exactly. 80% of it, we hear this all the time. Steve, I know you know this. Oh, it's not that. I mean, we just do it like this and then it's in balance.

But I want you to look at it and it's not.

So you're dating the client before you marry them?

Yeah, I love that. Well, okay, so can I ask, can we move into this space? Because you touched on it, the gimmicky stuff with the team and so forth. Right now I'm hearing a lot of that whole EOS system that everyone's really kind of gravitating to. I love one of our colleagues in our industry was like, I've always danced around it. Now we're formalizing it and they're working to it. I'm wondering what you think of that process, if that's something that you've thought about as Well, or have you done it? And what, what do you think? I mean, that's just one of so many. I feel like that's one that seems to be a gravitation right now for accounting firms, right?

Yeah.

So, so the EOS system you're talking about is from Gino Wickman out of the book Traction, right? Which is an excellent book. I've read it like 3 times. And if you started reading that book and you're like, oh man, this is not for me. Yes, it is. Keep going.

Okay.

It's, it's, it's tailored.

The Rock Block. Oh, I gotta read this again.

You gotta get into it. My man's got it on the camera. There you go. Um, it's really excellent. And a lot of the book is like, do you have a $10 million company? You should start doing this. You could start doing this under 6 figures. Like, the, the concepts are just good. And you may not be able to implement all of it, but like what you were talking about, the rocks, easily Without a doubt, one of the best things that we check daily. And so, and we led this off a while ago about like, hey, let's talk about benchmarking, right? And benchmarking is supposed to be what is the number that we need to do? Like, what is the number that tells us how we are doing and how can we make that number better? Is this even the right number for us in the first place? That fundamentally is what that is. And this is from EOS rocks. And so if you're like, man, should I, should we begin to do that? Yes. Spend a lot of time thinking about this because it, this, our rocks are why I was able to work way under, way under the normal amount of hours and have a very loopy, like, Percocet brain and the business was fine, right? Because we knew. Because in that 4 hours I would get a little report and in that little report would have all of my numbers and I'd be like, cool, we're fine. Everything's solid. We are doing everything that we're supposed to be doing. I don't have to worry about this. Go back to bed. And that's so— yes, 100%. I will, I will cosign on rocks at a minimum. Put some big rocks together. Put together your— I think Traction calls it— they call them big rocks, but they also call them like every team member should have One number. Every team member should have one number, and I'm happy to explain a little bit more about what they mean with that.

Yeah, that would be awesome to hear because that's interesting. So we— homework, Linda, homework note. Steve, we're just dragging you in because we're just like one happy family.

So I've got my traction. At least I'm there.

I have that book. Linda has to get that book again. The hurricane swept it away. Essentially, it did.

It took a lot of things away.

Right?

That's that's how that goes. Okay, so I'm going to share my screen with you guys again. If you're listening to the podcast, stop it. Go to YouTube, and I'm gonna prep this up because it's really excellent. Let me see if we can do a little bit of this.

There we go.

Thank you so much for. Turning this back on for me.

Okay.

So, and I'm gonna give this a little bit of time to load up. When you're coming up with KPIs and benchmarks, right, there's, there's 2 different ways. And I'm gonna, I'm gonna begin to use the word KPI here when we're talking about the numbers. That is a key performance indicator. These are, this is a list of, according to Traction, it should be maybe 5 numbers up to 12 at tops, but there shouldn't be a whole lot of them that tell you how your business is doing. And if you're really good, a KPI is what they call a leading indicator. And the best example you're ever going to get in what kind of indicators there are is it comes down to like diet and exercise, right? You've got leading indicators and lagging indicators. A lagging indicator would be, man, I lost 2 pounds this week, right? That's a lagging indicator. That is the result of some work that you did. The leading indicator would be, man, I ran a mile every day. I ran my mile today and then I ran my mile this day and this day and this day. And because I'm running this mile, I think I'm losing 2 pounds a week. And that's the kind of— it's very action-oriented. It's not very results-oriented. Those are the numbers that you're looking for, right? And so when we think about benchmarking and KPIs in a bookkeeping business, not taxes, not accounting, just bookkeeping. The end result in your production is a client has financial statements in their hand by a certain date, right? That is a lagging indicator. And lagging indicators can tell you that something broke somewhere. And so we measure that, we measure for sure. And I get a Slack message, I'll show you this. Well, first, I'm going to see if there's anything there that you shouldn't see. But what I can show you, I think, Is just the report of our— oh yeah, I'm going to copy this and paste it in. Oh, this is going to make us look real good. So this is a message that I got from my office manager saying, hey, here's your lagging report for our 20th close. Now, some of, some of our real estate investors are syndications and funds. They hire third-party property managers for hundreds of units. They produce property portfolio financials, and then we incorporate those with entity-level financials. And so we have a 20th close to account for that. And then we've got different statuses. We've got 40 clients in this 20th close. 19 of them were done on the 20th. And so this is going to tell us like, hey, what's going on? Like, who's on this list and why? And so then we kind of go through and we can say, okay, so 9 of them are in progress on the way. 5 of them are technically in, like they've sold the property. And so they don't really care about their finances and we're kind of wrapping it up, but they're still paying us. Like whatever, but we're able to get all of these lagging indicators, right? But none of this really matters because if that's the only thing that you're tracking, you don't know really what needs to be fixed. Like what's going on in the business? It's now the 20th, it's the 21st, you're looking at this, half of my stuff is late. What, what's going on? And now you're irrationally angry at your team who may just be doing their best. Right. So we got to give your team one number that they can hit consistently or not that says, hey, we're doing our job, and then we can begin to fix a system. So like my team is in 3 components. We have bookkeepers that do the job. Oh, I've now carried my box all the way up here.

That's not good.

Boop.

We've got bookkeepers that handle transactions, and I'm going to paint in broad strokes here. I'm not— this is not masterclass time, right? Um, bookkeepers are handling transactions. Then we've got what's called a lead bookkeeper that does what we effectively call quality control, or QC. And then we've got sort of account managers. Um, we call them, uh, specialists internally, just because our specialists, like my fund Specialist does not talk to my short-term rental property managers because they don't— they just don't have those skill sets, right? They just don't live in that world. But my specialists actually deal with the, like, meetings and delivery, right?

Mm-hmm.

So I know if every single one of these people need a number that are going to dictate whether something is done or whether we're showing up for our deliverable correctly, that it needs to be tied to the task that they're doing. And that number can be an action, and that's, that's leading, or it can be needs to be done by whatever date, which is lagging, right?

Mm-hmm.

And so for our like lagging number, sort of, kind of for this and like month end, like, hey, transactions need to be done by the 2nd of the month. There's no reason for us to still be coding transactions on the 3rd, right? Get in there. Make it happen. Now, what does that mean for transactions? If you're putting this off until the last minute and coding all 800 transactions on the first of the month, you're going to have a really bad time and you're probably going to miss this lagging indicator. So what number can I think of that will clearly communicate, hey, I have coded up-to-date transactions Every week, right?

Yeah.

It's real simple for us. It was, it was, this was a no-brainer.

It was okay.

The bookkeeper's job every week is to go on the portal and send an automated email to the client that either says, hey, I have no questions for you, or I have questions for you, get in the portal, let's figure it out. Every week they're supposed to send this email. And so our number for bookkeepers is, did you send your email this week?

Like that.

I love this.

And that is a— and then I've got my assistant goes through the next Monday, looks at all the portals, sees what emails went out, didn't go out, puts it in a thing, sends it to me. Here's the clients that did and did not get their, their weekly touch. And that puts a ton of accountability on your bookkeeper because they could lie. They could send the email, we don't have any questions. And then at the end of the month, data dump and we'll see that. We'll know audit logs are alive and well. Here at LionShare Bookkeeping, right? But it puts— but it helps kind of everybody get into a rhythm, right? And it's, it's low stakes. It's not daily. It's, hey, if you're going to be on vacation, I get it. Tell me. And but like, it really begins to kind of set this out. So instead of done by the 2nd of the month, it's 1. Their number is 1, and that 1 is like, like email to client.

Per week.

Did you hit your one big rock? Because if you did, we're probably on our way to success here, right?

Got it. That's so— this is applicable really in any profession. I mean, it's you, and I love it how simple it is, but you just distilled this whole piece from how to measure it. You went from Here's the number. What is the value of this number to how to measure it in the way that the workflow is so succinctly that it just helps understand if we're sitting here on this side as professionals going, how do we do this? We're a number of 1, or we are a number of 1.5. We have a sub that's helping. What's that measure that you can create for yourself? Because how do you repeat it? And I think it has to do with specializing, how to manage. That's the way I'm seeing it and I love it. You just like what you do in your industry. Sure, it's complementary to other industries, but it works within yours because, you know, you can manage that metric right there. I love that.

And it also is gonna help you find that bottleneck, right? Where is the issue happening? Because when you see It could be a specific person. It could be maybe it's a specific person on your team, but they're overloaded and you didn't realize it and they're not telling you, right? Or they may be telling you, they might be waving the white flag and you're not recognizing that white flag. It's gonna let you see that someone's just overwhelmed and they can't keep up. They're constantly behind, you know, and you're just killing off your employee where they're sitting back going, oh my God, I don't— and they don't wanna say it to you.

They hide.

Right. Because they don't wanna let you down because they love their job. They love you. They love their job. They love the security. They're like, I can get it. I just need to— no, you probably can't. Please ask for help. Please ask for help.

Yeah. And I really highly recommend if you, if you are listening to this, please pop over to the video because it really, it's not a complex detailed thing, but I'll tell you the way you just lay that out is so simple. It looks so simple and it really, yeah, like Sarah said, mind blown. I mean, this is just, just what we need to do in our businesses to make them work, right? So then if I fall off a ladder, which I hope it never happens, I can have it work. Because what you saw in that picture, what I noticed was that you weren't reliant only on the top of the funnel here, the boss or the owner. You've now got this system in place where you're going from the transactional level, which could be your outsourcing team, to the quality control, which could be your internal team or doing that little bit higher level stuff. And then you've got that whole list down and it lets the whole team see the value Because your foundation now is that transactional team. That's where it starts. You can't have bricks in the mortar falling out on the foundation, then the whole thing's gonna come tumbling down. So it's really important. And I think that alone, just seeing it like laid out like that would be great even for the team to see.

Well, you know, Ben, one time in one of our classes several months ago, you shared in Clockify how you were able to identify when one of your team members was having a problem. Can you talk a little about that?

Yeah. So all of this is related, right? It's— and some people feel differently about how you pay your team or whatever. I'm not here to break up any happy homes. But if you're not tracking per client, I don't care about like the job inside the client nearly as much as just per client. Just give me the information. Case in point, because you were speaking to this, we have here at LionShare a wide variety of styles of team member. We've got W-2s, we've got— and they're hourly. We've got contractors in the States. We've got offshore staff. Right. And my offshore staff are delightful. They are so good at what they do. I love them to pieces. And one of them in particular, absolute rock star. We're going to promote him. We're in the process of training him to be quality control for us and then just hiring people underneath him. He's so excellent. And then I get my weekly report for our, for our, like, for our number one, like, did everybody get an email this week? And most of his clients, not just this week, but like for a couple of weeks now, nothing. Crickets. I'm like, what is going on? And it was nothing for me to be able to hop in just to his time tracking and to his Clockify and say, filter by client. What are you working on every day? Because I know he's working. I know he's working. That's who he is. What are you working on? And I had forgotten that one of our clients that was in recurring got an audit for 2018.

Oh.

Back when, back when he was sick and commingling everything and just getting started. And I'd said, hey, buddy, you know this client, why don't you just go deal with that really quick? And he's been burning it out trying to get this cleanup done so that he can help the specialists have their weekly cleanup meeting with this person and their CPA, and it's all working together. And so, he's dialed in, focused. This has to be the priority above everything else. And he just wasn't getting his other stuff done. And so, when I came into that meeting, it wasn't rah-rah, bad boss, mean energy, you're letting me down. It was, dude, I'm so sorry. I've really set you up to fail here. I really wish you would have told me because I don't do— what do I do all day? I support you. That's what I'm supposed to be doing.

Mm-hmm.

Please let me know the next time that this happens. Let's fix this right now. What do you need from me? And it's, and it's a great way to be a good boss, to, to point out like, hey, please don't do this. Like, you're suffering. Please tell me. Let's please get the stuff done. The number's here for a reason. And maybe is it time to do something different? Do I need to hire somebody under him to do those guys so that I can have him be the cleanup powerhouse that I know that he is? You know, it just— A good number will tell on itself, and having that time tracking in place gives you the context you need so you don't have to pull water from rocks in a situation like that.

I love it because you also helped them understand. I appreciated that you made this a priority. I thought it was like a, hey, go do this kind of thing, and they have that trust and experience with you that they wanted to do good, that they wanted to excel. And it's interesting that we're talking about this because I just happened on X, former Twitter. I don't know what the hell you want to call this thing. Anyways, I happened to see a post from someone who basically was on a bit of a rant, who was in the space of saying, hey, why are these CPA firms Boasting about this and paying pennies and lack of support to their team. Grow up and support your team, essentially, was kind of the crux of it, and, and flip it. And I do feel like that's a huge thing to us. Yes, it's an investment if we want to bring in somebody to train on and do this. But yes, it's also an investment if we want to take you to a conference and invest in you. as much as we possibly can financially. It is more about how we work together. It's more about your lives as much as it is ours, because what you do in performance saves us on the back end in other ways too, right? Like, we got to— I don't know. Steve does this really well, and I call you out, Steve, on this, is you think about some of your team members and the things that they like and the special surprises. It's not about the annual bonus. It's about—

No.

Right. Like, it's—

I'll tell you. Yeah. Working with our law firms, I mean, I get passionate about this.

Yeah.

It just drives me nuts at the holidays when they come and they say, well, we want to give out $30,000 in bonuses. And I'm like, well, did you look at your KPIs? We've been talking about what your paralegal's KPI relationship, you know, their hours in relation to collections or whatever the KPI is that we need to monitor.

Yeah.

And, you know, did they earn— did they earn that $5,000 you want to give to them?

Yeah.

If they didn't, what are we going to do to figure out ways to motivate them? Maybe it's not money. Maybe it's time off. Maybe it's they're taking care of a sick relative and they need— they need something there. I mean, you have to dig deeper and find out what it is that's making them tick the way that they're ticking, you know. But, but just throwing money at it, because I've seen so many times in law firms Give out these massive bonuses at year end. And I used to, when I worked in law firms, I could sit there and go, well, I know Sarah is going to leave after she gets her bonus. She's going to give notice.

Oh, yeah.

I'll be darned. I would create my own little wager system on it. It's not always— you're right. You're right.

It's not. Well, part of me here is that we kind of talked about too earlier, we have accountability and boundaries with clients. We have accountability and boundaries with team members as well, in a healthy way, not in a demeaning, demoralizing way. And I do feel strongly that Linda and I have stepped through this a few times where we've increased too fast, too soon. And so we've learned that it's hard to realign it. But it also, it's like, where are we with that client? Do we get to reevaluate our services to them? Can level up. Do we get to evaluate that? Are you in process of working with us on that so that we can use that? Because that difference would be a reward back to you, right? How well you manage it. And I feel like what I hear, Ben, is you set up a system that's just so well balanced. You can monitor it, you can measure it, you can Puppet on strings in a positive way, not in the negative way. And the misleading thing I do feel strongly— and let me know if you feel this way— that when you have a global team, it's management. I feel like the analogy of like, hey, I'm just gonna get this, that, well, the stuff will be done and then tomorrow. No, it's, it's like any employee. You've got to foster and manage it and reward it and/or point out the things. Am I right? Or, I mean—

Yeah, you are right.

Oh, 100%. Yeah. And so, and what I— here's what I love that Steve has said too many times to me that's resonated deeply, right? And so here you go. If you, if you take care of your team, your team will take care of your clients, right? Classic Steve. Classic Steve. He's dead right. He's dead right. So when we're talking about incentivizing, the other thing that I know about bookkeeping is that by and large, it's kind of a thankless job a little bit. You're either doing everything right and you're, and you're, you're hitting the job description or you're not in your trash. Or the one thing you do wrong is, is the, is somehow the straw, right? Yeah, exactly. And so what we're, what, so what are we doing as, as CEOs, as team leaders? We're attracting these bookkeepers to our team. Are we putting them just in that situation multiplied by 20 or 30 other personalities? That's awful. I don't want to work there. Where do you want to work? I want to work somewhere where I have a little win every day, where somebody on my team that gets it has my back. And so the number of times that I'll go to a team member that's underperforming, they're not hitting their number, and I'm just like, hey man, I'm looking at what you got going on. Help me understand, like, what's happening? And I'll begin to— I'll kind of give them permission to say things like, man, I'm just busy, or I was wrapped up in a priority, or man, this client just drains me.

Okay. Okay.

Do we need a gimmick? Do we need a little Raphael red turtle moment here? Or maybe is this client just kind of the worst and I need to step in and play bad cop? And I'll have conversations with team members. I'm like, hey, I really want you. I'm gonna, I'm gonna get involved. I'm gonna see if we can change this up. I truly, I need you to tell me if this gets better or worse, or if it stays bad. Because if it stays bad and I'm not getting the buy-in, we'll just fire this person. I am not married to this client like I am married to you. And for me, that's huge, dude. That's where the— there's a A ton of fear on the CEO side with the implications of that. But you will have buy-in from team members. They'll, they'll never leave you, right? Or if they do, it will be heart-wrenching and they will give you infinite notice. I've had that happen to me twice now. 2 rock stars on my team had to leave. They could not keep working for me. They had their dream job happen. Doesn't matter. And they come in like, I hate this. So I need to, I need to make this move. But I'll, I'll stay with you through, through the next 6 months if I have to, so that you can find a good person to fill this seat. Because I don't want to leave you without you.

It does. It really does.

That's huge, Ben. Oh man, I love it. I have a confession here.

I have a—

I'm a byproduct of Mama Raphael over here, sitting over here, who listens in and basically is our reminder of, do you know how much work you do? For this client? Did you hear that tone of voice? If you don't have that within yourself or have somebody else like, hey, I'm hearing you say this, I think you need to find that buddy, right? Because it helped you. I mean, don't you? Yeah.

So if you don't have a mama that's on the side who is always our— like, she doesn't say a lot, but when she says something, it's so poignant, you better listen. But I mean, if you don't have that, it's good to have even a colleague or a friend that will be there for you, that if you have those days where you just need to, like, offload, that they don't work for you. They're just completely separate.

So I'll tell you, um, what's really hard about this is when you're working by yourself, right? Yes, that's, that's the worst. Yeah, because you're the only— you're on Zoom calls all day with these people. You're in the emails, right? Um, I alluded to this earlier.

I was a—

my last job before this was a bartender, right? I was, I was a Bartender, server, host. I ran that place. And I can always tell that I am stressed out when I start having dreams about forgetting people's sides of ranch. I know when I start having dreams about working in the restaurant again, I'm like, oh, something's out of balance here. My body is telling on itself. I'm feeling like I'm busy. I'm feeling like I can't keep up. Anytime if I dream about sides of ranch or if I'm losing sleep, I'm like, oh, That's it. If I'm like, if I can't help but neurotically check my phone for an email, or like, or like, hey, if John Smith is mad at me, and John Silver emails me, and I feel my blood pressure spike, I'm like, oh, no, this guy's got to go. He's got to go. Like, something has to change about this.

True.

Yeah.

True.

You just got to hear from the industry.

Yeah.

You got to listen to yourself sometimes.

I love it.

Oh my gosh.

Well, Steve and I, I mean, coming out of event planning, restaurants, opening restaurants, hotel—

Hotel business. Yeah.

I mean, you are hammered in on how to handle client pushback, customer service at a redefined level. So I love it. I do feel like that industry really needs to be kind of a Something where people should start, to be honest.

I think everyone should work in the hotel business for 5 years before they go out in the world.

5 years. 5 years. Serve your purpose here.

You're done.

Yeah, it's long enough to get that good trauma in.

It does get trauma in. But it's funny that you say that because there is that whole thing, like, you're seeing it now, the benefits of health and wellness and then what people are doing and the procrastination coaches are coming up and this is coming up and I'm like, Oh my God, overwhelming. You got to trust yourself, trust your gut, write it down, do something. But yeah, it's so true. So true.

Well, you know, with the 3 of us, we've done this before. It'll be a Saturday morning, I'll hop into Facebook, there's Linda, and she's like, oh my God, this just happened. And in a private message. And I'm like, oh, I had the same thing. And we're back and forth about— and you know what? It helps. It helps to have that. And with you, Sarah, you and I have picked up the phone and talked to each other before. You know, and I think that's part of what brought the 3 of us together. And because of Ben, who made such a huge difference in my life. And, you know, because I was, I was in that alone syndrome when I found you last fall, Ben. That's where I was at. I was in a very lonely place, very frustrated place. And I was like, what do I— I was where you were when COVID hit. And I'm like, I need someone to kick me in the butt. I need someone to tell me I'm okay. I need someone to say, you can do this. You know, and you give yourself that gift. You know, you have to have— you have to give yourself permission to go fix whatever's wrong.

Oh, yeah. And it's exactly that. It's— you just have to give yourself permission. And that's sometimes that's impossible.

That's huge.

It feels like it's totally out of reach. But one of my, one of my mentors is a huge fan of Just surrounding yourself. Always have peers around you at the same level. Have at least one person downline from you that wants to be where you are so you can kind of nurture and mentor that relationship. And somebody that's where you want to be that is kind of showing you the other side of what's happening. And that if you can do that, you can put people in your life that are like that, the loneliness will disappear. You'll get the fulfillment and the social interaction and all that. It's just, it's just so powerful.

I feel like it's true of anyone that's in a journey, whatever that journey is. It's like a recovery method of moving forward. You have to acknowledge, appreciate, balance it, and then go ahead with it, whatever that is. But inside of it, you brought it up at the beginning, gratitude. And I love that you're like, who cares how cheesy this stuff is, the gimmicks, the little things?

What I love about him, I love it because— I mean, you pay this guy to be cheesy.

It was never something I thought I was gonna make money at, so I, I guess here we are.

Well, you— I, I, I mean, I can't wait to have you on again because you— I would like understand that journey that you made that we've all kind of hinted in, in our own space. We made a journey from where we were before, to how we got into this industry, to how we possibly niched or specialized further. And, and then the more you look at it through that lens, the perfection of things happen not to be perfect, but to make yours— there's that value, there's that internal gratitude that you have within yourself of like, yeah, I got this, I can do this. So I just Man, I could spend a whole day with you.

And then you do coaching. So you coached Steve. So you do coaching for other bookkeepers. So if somebody is listening in and they are looking at like, this is me, if this spoke to you and you're listening and you're like, this is me, I could use some help on that, whether you're that solopreneur or you're a person that's got a team and you're trying to figure things out, you know, how can we reach you if we want to hire you to help us with our firm?

Sure, 100%. And we've kind of talked a little bit about benchmarking today. Part of what coaching really is for us is it's not instruction, it is action and implementation. What are your benchmarks? What are your numbers? How can we get there? And that's really what our coaching program is all about. So we've kind of— we've recently retooled it a little bit. I put all the— I put the bow on it last night because I knew you were going to ask me about it. So builtbybookkeepers.com, that's, that's my coaching program. That's what we do. And it is to help bookkeepers at any stage of their journey, whether they're a little solo bookkeeper that's just getting it done one late night at a time, up through some bookkeeping manager that's really not sure how they got there, but everything seems to be broken. We want to help you kind of get to that next step where you're, where you're free and you're running the business you want. And so if you want to learn more about that, come check out builtbybookkeepers.com. Shoot me a message. We're happy to talk to you about what you got going on and pretty honestly tell you if you need coaching or if you just need a quick little kick in the pants and go do what you need to do and come back later when you're ready to go.

And if you do need the coaching, I know from listening to Steve that you have to dedicate the time. So you're not just going to sign up and it's going to be like the clients, oh, it's magically going to be better. You actually have to do the work. So know that going in, you got to dedicate time to this because it's going to be some work. I know, Steve, you wanted to Describe what you— I remember you having to do homework.

You know, I just, I like how Ben, he took what I think there were 4 in our group, and we would meet on Tuesday nights for like 3 hours, I think it was every other week. And he would, he would challenge us. And he, you know, each of us got about a half hour to interview with him during this meeting, where we are at, what we did the last couple of weeks, how we got there. the tools we used, all those sorts of things. And this gentleman would just sit there and listen and absorb. And when he was done interviewing all of us, I would've gone and had a scotch and water at that point. But he literally would take over the meeting and go, okay, you talked about this, Linda, and Sarah, you talked about that, and Steve has this problem. And he would just weave it all together and give us our marching orders for the next time. And we made progress. And we got this, we got the sense of safety with ourselves and our businesses and the getting over the fears and all. I mean, it's just, it was hugely powerful, so worth it. And then I, I subscribed to his weekly rhythms because I just have to have every week, I need my Ben recording to show me what magic he's got in store for us this week. And I'm just taking notes like crazy and then get in a meeting with our staff and I'm like, guess what he said this time? And we're going to try this. And it's amazing. It was a gift to us to do that with him.

I love that you're saying all this. I'm sure.

I mean, I'm not alone.

I know.

That's huge.

It's huge. I'm sure, Ben, it feels like just to know the impact, the journey you've been on and the impact to someone like Steve, been in it a long time, the tenure. It's such a gratitude space to be in. I got to say.

Yes. The absolute fulfillment that I get from it. That's really where coaching started for me. It was like, man, I don't want this huge coaching business. That's not what I want. I really want like maybe 4 or 5 people at a time that I can really just show up for, you know, where it's like, hey, buddy, I've been there. It sucks. You may be in the middle of your gratitude moment. It may be looming and you haven't realized it yet, but like, it's, it's coming for you.

Mm-hmm.

What, what can we do? How can we begin to structure and build out? And, and to your point, It's not a lot of— it's not instruction. A lot of people sell courses. The new thing that we're launching has little videos in it, but they're little on purpose. They're sprints. They're not lessons. It's, here's the bones of this so that we can implement. You know, that's what it's about.

You don't just do this to try to get us to give you $5,000 or whatever. You do this because you care. You genuinely put that across in these meetings that you care. And what I also got from you, Ben, That's a huge compliment to you is you would share how you take care of you in the middle of all this craziness. And I loved that because it gave me permission to stop and do that too. Because you knew that's where I was at. Yeah.

Well, I like that. Yeah. You know, late nights, get into, oh, I'm just not— I just won't do anything for me this year.

I'll do—

I'll get to me next year.

Boo, boo.

No, that's not fun.

I think even just talking about it, opening the door of conversation is allowing you to reframe it in your mind. And I mean, I got feedback this week from the Scaling New Heights thing. And I got to say, I teared up because I had so much gratitude over the fact that somebody said they actually learned something and they wished they had more time and it was applicable. And I thought, oh my God, I was just speaking my mind and my heart. That's what I was doing. So I completely agree. I didn't know that was something you needed. And I love that we can do that. We can do that for each other in all kinds of ways. So it's just been such a reward to spend time with you today. I am so— Steve, you know me well. Let me just say that, my friend.

And we get the benefit of Ben taking us out of here today. And he's got a great voice, too, by the way.

Before he does that, though, Uh-huh. Ben, will you come back?

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

100%.

I'm putting him on the spot. 100%.

Pick whatever you want.

Yeah.

And I led with this. I was like, I feel like I'm going to show up and just be part of the orchestra. And that genuinely, for anybody that's like, man, I wonder if I should go on the pod. Yes, you should go on the podcast because you guys have been nothing but fun and very understanding and very good Passing the mic and all, like, it's— you guys are just stellar. So yeah, anytime you want me to come on and just rant some more, you've got my number. Like, it'd be my pleasure.

We know you. I love it.

Please take this out today, Ben.

Sure.

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Awesome job.

Well, thank you. Thank you.

And until we meet again.

Oh yeah. So true.

It was a pleasure. Thank you for having—

for joining us.

Thank you.

Thank you. Bye.