Real Financial Challenges and How We Solved Them

Welcome to Accountants Law Pod, where accounting professionals and law firms converge, hosted by Linda Artesani, Sarah Prevost, and Stephen Libhart. Welcome back to the podcast, everyone. And, uh, it's kind of cool, we're in spring now. Hey, I mean, Florida spring and Florida winter, this kind of blends, doesn't really— you can't tell. But I know when I was up I remember like looking, oh my God, there's a crocus and there's a forsythia, you know, the big yellow plant. I'm like, ah, it's finally spring. And then snow would land on top of it.

I saw a robin this weekend. I was like, yes. That's so pretty. My koi fish are coming up to eat. They always come up in the spring.

Where do they go in the winter?

Well, I have this giant pond in the back part of the property here. And I have these gigantic, like huge sewer pipes in the bottom of the pond. And that's where they hide in the winter. They just park in there and their heartbeat slows down to like 4 beats a minute.

Whoa.

And then I have one koi who was maybe 2 inches long in 1993 when I got him. And he's now 30, however many years old. And he's like a good 35-pounder fish. I mean, he's massive. And he's always the one that comes out and comes up and says, I'm hungry. And he did it this last week. And so that's when spring is here because the water temperature's warm enough now. So he wakes up and comes up.

Well, we're having 60 degrees today, Steve, and we'll be something.

So I hear.

Yeah.

Okay. Forecasting some 80 degrees here this week. Can you believe that?

He has weird weather. It goes up and down. Like, yeah, you have one minute it's beautiful, like here, and the next minute it's cold again.

Oh, Steve, bipolar Colorado. Absolutely.

One minute. Sorry.

I'm like, speaking of bipolar, my partner is doing the polar plunge this Saturday.

A weird segue. Hope he's not listening. Speaking of bipolar, my partner.

No, that's too funny. But that word polar, he's doing the Polar Plunge.

No way. I would never do that.

I'm gonna sit in the car and watch. I'm not gonna— I'm not getting in that water.

Good for him. I think I fogged up my glasses right now.

That's so funny, Steve. You just sit in the car with the heater on and watch him jump in the cold water. I hope you bring him a warm towel or something.

Yeah, we'll take lots of blankets and stuff. So, oh, I can't wait to see this recording.

You might want to tell him not to listen that week. Oh, this week we're actually going to talk about real financial challenges and how we solved them. So the names have been changed to protect the innocent.

Well, that's a chilly, uh, financial challenge.

I know, right? I know. What a way to go.

Polar chilly. Oh, man.

Oh, my.

I, I was curious what, you know, the power of AI. I was just curious, like, what it would give us top challenges. And I had some in my mind, so it was kind of nice to see it get somewhat cemented. And it gave me a nice little list of obviously cash flow management would be one, high overhead costs, which To protect the innocent. Linda and I have had this conversation with a client of ours for some time, and that's, you know, leaning into technology and exposure of how to do that. Another one was client payment delays, which we've always been huge advocates on, AR receivables, and then inefficient billing practices to tie back to that economic uncertainty. And then another Yeah, and another one would be the lack of financial visibility. So, so those were sort of the key sections that came up. Those are all good ones.

We should talk about financial visibility. What, what, what does that mean?

Uh, I think for us, what we have seen, what it's given me is somewhat what we have— she and I have seen is, are, are your numbers actually truthful? Is it garbage in or garbage out?

Right.

Do you even know that these numbers tie back to anything? Some people, business attorneys especially, spidey sense is like, this just doesn't look right. No one's booking this in right. My accounting practices aren't supporting what I think I'm earning. Wouldn't you say, Linda? Wouldn't that be like—

Yeah.

Okay.

I just had a client refer, and this is an old legacy client, referred another person to me to just help them clean it up. And I asked, what are you using for payroll? I couldn't tell. And they said, oh, well, what she does, the bookkeeper's retiring. What she does is she does everything. He's, first of all, we have a manual time card punch machine.

Wow.

Oh, wow. He goes, yeah, from the 1800s, I think. And then he said, basically, she's doing it manually. And I'm like, and he said, she works 40 hours, but I think the job's really only down to like maybe 8 if you modernize it. And I'm like, yeah, probably. When I looked at it, I'm like, You could see all the old— like, they didn't— she didn't want the bank feed connected. That makes too much of a mess, she said.

Is it, is it on the online platform, QuickBooks Online?

Yeah, it's on QuickBooks Online. That was the odd thing. It's on QuickBooks Online, but it's not— no bank feeds were connected. And he goes— and I guess he was like a silent partner, but then the, the guy needed money. So the main partner needed money, and he kept funneling the money. And then finally he was like, well, let me see what's going on here.

And he got in there.

I could see the loan, but he's like, This is incredible that this is so backwards. And now this woman's retiring, and I'm like, okay, well, if we're gonna move your payroll, kind of need to do it this week. So it's the end of the quarter, you know. And if she's leaving May 1st, I mean, who's gonna— no one's gonna wanna do that manually. I like to tie those up in the quarter on a quarterly basis, you know. So it's fascinating that there's a lot of— and when it comes to law firms, this is not a law firm, but when it comes to law firms, What do you think of— and I was just doing a couple recordings for the blog post, and it was about AI. And it's like, you think paper, right? You think of the desk with all the paper. I mean, we've been in enough meetings, Sarah, where we're sitting there and the attorneys got piles of papers on both sides of them and boxes. And it's like, oh my gosh, how do you work?

It clutters your mind. Um, it's— what type of— I'm just curious, what type of industry is he?

Um, he's in some kind of a— they sell stuff, so it's some kind of a They have inventory on their books, so they sell. But they also— I don't know how they managed, because I'm sure it was in desktop that they moved to online. Okay. How they manage that. But they've got a big balance in the opening balance equity account.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Which is—

I was curious because of the way that you described it. And Steve, I'm sure you've seen this with, you know, your own experience. But Linda and I often see, like, We've got a desktop file over here. We've been kind of working over here. Should we— maybe our practice management's in this platform. Should we upgrade to the online platform? We'll talk about lack of visibility.

And then they put it on Simple Start and say, I don't know why this doesn't connect.

Doesn't work. You can't be in Simple Start.

No, in Simple Start you have to do some opening balances.

Yeah.

Thankfully they can't buy the GL version because they'd all go for that too. You have to be an accountant to have that. But yeah, it's amazing how people manage their finances when— and certainly that's a way that you can help a firm become more— I mean, those are stories that these are real life stories that we have where the person's like, I'm on QuickBooks Online, but I'm doing my billing over here and I'm licking the envelopes and mailing out the bills paper-wise. It's like, why? Why are you doing that that way? How long does that take? And you have to buy the stamps. You gotta buy the envelope. You gotta fold it up and mail. There's a, you Huge time process. And yeah, we did that a long time ago, but it's not necessary in today's world.

So that old shoe is comfortable.

You know, people don't like change. That's the biggest thing.

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, and do you have the objective of what the business wants to be doing versus what, where it's currently at in the financial? I mean, do you have all the pieces there to understand what you need to be objectively looking at to understand where you have the strength?

This file, the balance sheet had, like, nothing on it. I mean, it had a lot of equipment that had been fully appreciated, and I'm looking at it going, there's nothing on this balance sheet except for opening balance equity, which had a lot of stuff, and trying to figure it out because I don't know this industry, you know? And I'm just like, how do I clean this up? And what can you— he's like, what can you help me do? Because he wants to do it himself. I'm like, because he does it himself on his own on the file.

Mhmm.

And I'm just like, this other company that we do. And I'm like, okay, well, you really want to do that? But I don't even know what it does by even by the name. I can't tell. It's got a very bizarre Our name, all in caps, of course, because nothing says I'm old like caps.

On your chart of accounts. On your chart of accounts.

This is the name of the company file, isn't it? Oh, it's the name. And the chart of accounts as well.

Okay. I was going to say, wait, on the chart of accounts. But well, okay. So just in law firms though, like in looking at sort of— Steve, you asked the question about financial visibility. What about the risk area? Like what areas comes to mind for risk of looking at financials and trying to understand If you don't have visibility on them, how are you going to understand what those challenges are? What's the risk of the wrong way, or maybe having it the right way? What's the better— I mean, what side of the coin sounds most appealing to help advise on to you?

Boy, that's a loaded question.

It is. I know.

Help me out here. I don't know.

When you look at financials or when you're looking at advising someone during a challenging time, what do you— what do you—

I hone in on labor costs right away.

You do? Okay.

So there's a big expense usually. That is a good place to start.

It's the largest expense. And, you know, so many— so often over the years I've seen law firms who are struggling financially. And I think back to 2008 when the economy was not doing well and we're facing some of that again. And, you know, it's a good time to break out of the comfort zone a little bit and share information with the people on your team. And say to them, does this bus pass mean anything to you in benefits, or would you rather have the money in your paycheck? Or, you know, that— those sort of things. And where can we adjust and move and change things? Because, you know, and this is a real-life scenario I'm giving you. One law firm I worked with, you know, they had bus passes and they had all kinds of different—

Disability insurance, the long-term, all the little things that add up, maybe.

All the things. And And, you know, nobody was using the parking. They were using the bus passes because it was a downtown firm. But I'm like, why do you have this parking? Why are you paying for this garage for all your employees? And the answer was, in case they use it. And I'm like, well, you can't, you can't afford that now.

Yeah.

You know, so I always start with the benefits, with the payroll, with 401, with everything, insurance.

I was gonna say insurance for sure. That's a place that— You know, it's a tough category, and it's so easy just to let the insurance policy roll and keep it going.

Let it go.

And it keeps going up every year. And, you know, because it's a lot of work to kind of go through and find something better and time-consuming. I mean, we have that even here at our— with our condos, and I'm not doing that job, but that takes a lot of time and really pushing to get it and get the best policy for us at the best price. It's something that you can do. I mean, I don't know how much wiggle room you'd have, like, with malpractice or something like that, but those are pretty big fees. You know, even the insurance to protect you from hacking and all that.

Cyber insurance.

That's expensive. That's gone way up. When it first came out and nobody really had it, it was not that expensive, and that pricing has gone way up. Yeah. And even benefits, like, you don't have a lot of control over how much it costs for the benefits for your employees, but you wanna have that because you wanna maintain your staff. And I think we're coming out of a time where there was Not enough people for the jobs. And I think that's starting to shift where people—

That's starting to shift now.

You're right. Yeah. I have a friend who was visiting this weekend and she took a buyout on a job and now she's trying to find a job. And one of the things, and you don't even think of this as something that would happen, but she's trying to find a job. And because of AI, all these companies are using AI. So when I, when we hired Lori, We went— we got 400 applicants, and I went through all 400, narrowed it down to 100, gave them to Sarah and Nicole and said, hey, what do you think? And then we narrowed it down to like 5 to interview. And it was— that was done manually. And now there's systems in place to kind of sort through. She's like, I can't break the AI barrier. I can't even get anybody to talk to me.

Yeah.

Wow.

And then she said, I tried to have AI write my— I said, well, that won't work. If you're having AI write your resume, is probably gonna get triggered out for that.

Sure.

I mean, you gotta think about what can you do to shine above to get in there. And with the, with the AI system, I don't know how they work, but I'm sure there's, like, keywords that they have that she needs to have in her to get past that first barrier.

So I'm thinking, like, what you're saying, what you both have brought up is the first kind of area that you'd hone in on is the expense side. And so I'm thinking of productivity side, overhead costs on that side alone. But You've got that, and then you've got productivity. And how productive is the current staff that you have?

Well, you know, we've talked about that before, um, you know, taking a look at what, what are all the paralegals doing and how can you shift them into other higher-producing attorneys when they've got, you know, maybe one of your, one of your funnels of business is slowing down. So you need to take a look at that and what everyone's productivity is going into that funnel and Um, maybe you don't want to do that type of law right now and you want to focus on what's making money, and then you've got to shift the staff around. I'm sorry, I had to jump in on that one because I'm really passionate. That was number 2. Number 2 is what are the sources of income for me, you know?

So, well, okay, so if I— I think for me, when I first thought of this— and Linda, I'm curious about you because I want to go to see what you say too— for me, it was I wanted to see Where is the revenue sitting? How does it look? What's in the pipeline? What's the accounts receivable?

Yes.

Start with— I think of you set up shop, first thing you're doing is you're attracting clients. How is that managed? That's what I think of. And then the process from thereafter. But I'm curious, Linda, what your thoughts are. What do you—

We've had that when we looked at— for a while there, we're looking at everybody's AR, outstanding AR, because that's just money sitting there that Nobody wants to make the phone call. Nobody wants to try to collect on it. And it's a place that you could be like that amazing accounting firm that comes in and says, hey, we'll handle getting that moving for you. That money, we'll clean it up, whether we write some of it off, whether we hire a firm like ColdBox to come in and collect on your behalf, where it takes you out of it because nobody wants to make that phone call that says, hey, you owe me money. Now you've got a firm that does it professionally. And I think that that's an easy place to kind of pull money in that maybe if there's cash flow problems, it's a way to grab money that's sitting there that you've already earned, but you just didn't collect on. That's an important place to do it. And I think there's other ways. I mean, you can look at all your expenses. You can look at your, you know, software expenses and see who's using this software. We paid X amount for the software. How many users? Who's using it?

Yeah.

And also, there's also overlap. So we had that firm that we worked with that we got involved in modernizing their workflow. And then we got involved in doing that. We actually interviewed people to see what they were doing in their And we found that there was overlap in the AR department, that people were doing the same thing. And we're like, why is this happening? And we ended up having our new workflow where they weren't printing out 1,000 invoices and mailing them manually. And they started to do this new way with emailing and then paying electronically, which also is another savings of time and money. You get paid faster when you add the credit card option.

It's way faster. Yeah.

A lot of people are like, oh, I'm not taking credit cards. Don't wanna pay the fees. But if you get not paid at all, you want to get paid.

That costs more than a credit card fee.

Yes, 100%. So those are places that you can start to implement new workflows to get things happening. And if you find their work— people are overlapping because it was just like, oh, they added people over time and then the workflow changed, but there's people doing 2 jobs, you know, 2 of them are doing the same job and there's a stagnation in the workflow. You know, we came in as the outs. side person and said, hey, this needs to be changed. You need to do this. You need to do that because this will be better for you going forward. And this person shouldn't even be doing this job. They're way above this task. They should be doing something that's got more brainpower and more— and they were thrilled to get out of a job that was very mundane, but they had a person that's all they did was do this billing every month that was just paper-centric.

Yeah.

You know, we swooped in and saved a half— it was a half a job or whatever. That person ended up doing something way more brain, use their brain. And that's just places that we could come in and shift the staff around if we have to. And client— we've worked with a client that actually does very much handles his little— he has these groups of people that do these things. And it's fascinating how he handles that. And we learn from that too, watching how that's done.

Are you still billing by the hour?

Yes, a lot of people. That's another place.

You know, that's huge.

And some people have to based on the type of practice area. But if you look at practice area like personal injury, PI firms or contingency style firms, is how are your engagements set up? How much do you front? Do you have interval billing segments of time? Because you— it's hard to support some of that. Some you can't, you know, PIs, you can't. It's time of settlement. So you just have to know that you need to have a strong cash flow and you need to have reserves to support possibly a bigger case, right? Whereas other contingencies, you don't have to. You could, depending on the type of work, sure, it's time of settlement, but you have to have that engagement with your client to say, we're going to incur some costs. I'm going to have to bill you for these, you know, and in advance until— so there, there could be a whole bunch of different ways.

And even in a PI firm, even if you're not billing by the hour, you want to track the time to see who's more efficient in settling the matters, right, in the bigger firm. So that doesn't eliminate the time tracking. But also, yeah, and we had this happen in one of our firms that we work with. The person, they had like a number, an astronomical number on their AR, open AR, and come to find out nobody was following up with the billing at all. So the attorneys were billing and they were supposed to all be handling their own Following up and getting paid. Yeah, none of them did that. Yeah, you come in and we're like, wow, this is like we see in the over 90-day category. Oh well, everybody's supposed to do— every attorney bills and then they're supposed to follow up when they're not paid, and none of them were doing it. None of them.

That's normal.

Yeah, that happens a lot because it's a crappy job.

Can we back up to PI for a second?

Yeah.

Okay, so you're driving down the freeway, which is personal injury. You see the big PI billboard?

Yeah.

Does it say slip and fall, truck accident, ambulance? Does it say all that? No. It says, in a truck accident, call Fred Smith.

Yeah.

Now, my point is, in the PI firm, do they study— and I think they do, those bigger ones, the ones that are successful with it— is a slip and fall worth as much as a truck accident. Again, back to what we were talking about a while ago, where is the funnel being filled from? What do you want to focus on? And when, when times get tough, or when you're, when you're sucking wind in the, in the cash drawer and the bank or whatever, you know, what kind of business do I— you know, what are you attracting? What are you doing? And personal injury can really tailor itself to certain things.

It's a tough industry too, cash flow-wise.

Oh my gosh, it's terrible.

Yeah, you got it. Wrongful death.

Some of them just do wrongful death.

Yeah.

Or they do multi-practice areas so they can cover for the other one. We see that too.

We see that too. But that's a good thing though, is, you know, when you're thinking about that front end, that marketing expenses, how do you have an evaluation on it? Can you? Do you have the bandwidth if you're a small firm?

Exactly. You're the word evaluation. How do you, how do you look at it? How do you study it?

And those are true challenges. And I know that you can, like, we have a lot of questions like on our own firm. How did you find us? Those types of things. Um, but honestly, do you look at it through the lens of the acquisition of it? How much return are you getting? Who's helping you see that? And, you know, outside accounting firms, if you let them know your areas of concern or you want to develop a strategic plan, Sure, that's an extra cost in addition to the day-to-day stuff, but there's areas that we could help focus on. And, or we'll see it and bring it to your attention and say, okay, we're not, we're not seeing you're spending— we've seen this before— you're spending X on a coach, but we're not seeing movement. And I've had this come up in a different industry. You're spending X on a coach, an outside person did an analysis and came back and said you need to cut the coach out, not because It wasn't a value. It was they were not— the costs in the end were not going to add, and it was they were going to run out. And it really—

Makes no sense because they're not even doing it. It's not even following all that money out and, and use and listen and do the things they tell you to. Most of these people spend like $30,000 on a coach, and then they don't do anything that the coach tells them to do.

Yeah, that just blows me away when that happens. It's like, why not?

Sometimes it's the ego of, um, you know, they're in it, they do a free meeting from what I was told, one of the attorneys, they do a free meeting with this coach and they talk about how great it is. And then there's a little bit of a, oh, well, so-and-so, you know, so-and-so's got the coach and he 3x'd his revenue. So then it becomes, uh, everybody wants to be that person. And, but, and then it doesn't result in that. And because they're completely different practice area, they're completely different style of attorney.

And they expect the magic wand to be waved with the coach.

And, you know, it doesn't come without hard So, okay, so my next thought is, is the technology. When you're looking at leveraging technology, looking at core, core work versus non-core work, like what can you delegate? What can you— like what areas make sense for you to spend your time? What's the most effective use of your time? Obviously, Linda and I always say this, not doing the financials at 3 AM, trying to get your books done for tax purposes only, or A bank loan or whatever it is.

Or your billing. Billing.

Yeah. Because you make mistakes in that section. Well, Steve said it too.

You get— you see attorneys and they're doing all the work because they're a control freak and they don't want to let go and let the paralegal do it because the paralegal can do the exact same work for you. Why are you doing paralegal work when you could be doing attorney work and getting paid for it? You know why?

Why?

And it's cheaper for your client even because it's not work that necessarily needs to be done by the attorney. Yeah, that's something.

I can't tell you how many times with new attorneys and they say, well, I can just do my books. And I'm like, at how much per hour? How much per hour do you charge your clients? Go practice law and let the experts like us do the books.

You know, you'll recover. How much per hour are you going to be? Yeah, because really, I mean, your, your billable rate is X times whatever learning curve you need. To, to do it.

Right?

Right. And I— why pay me at the end of the year to fix what you did? Or catch up?

Oh, Linda, I love that. Yeah.

Yeah. That's no financial visibility. That's just year-end stuff.

And they're playing blind because they don't really— they don't do the work until the end of the year, and they don't know what they're doing. And I guess there's the old adage, and I've talked to many people over the years. They're like, I just go by what's in my checkbook. If I've got money in my checkbook, then I know I'm doing okay. There's a little bit of validity to that, but you know, that's not a good way to run a business. It's not going by what's in the balance in your checkbook.

Well, keeping abreast of the, you know, us and the tax preparer/CPA people are staying closer to all the IRS regulations that constantly change. You know, are meals 50% deducted this year, or are they 100% if the wind is blowing from the east and it's a Tuesday, or You know, whatever the law is, um, you know, the attorney's not going to keep up with that, but we will, we will have our hands on that a little bit more and can save money there. And so, to your point, Linda, at the end of the year, do you want to pay us to sort all this out, or do you want us to do it throughout the year?

Yeah.

And you go, you go practice law, you go turn those stones over and find those people that are going to pay you money that can afford us. I mean, you'll pay for us 10 times over.

Yeah. Absolutely.

Well, I guess the big part is that going back to the beginning with what's the objective? Is the objective to grow? Is the objective to have measured metrics? Is the objective to drive this thing? If you're saying that in a conversation and a consult with us, and then you say, but I'll do this myself. Okay. Those don't go. Those are not— Yeah.

They don't jive.

They don't. Right? They're not You're not going like this or like this. You're doing sinking to go back up. And I'm all for doing certain things myself, but I think— and you guys can say this if you feel this way too— at a certain point, I have to say, what is the value of my time, my energy, and the effort? And really, you know, if things change tomorrow and I— my life has got a different perspective and I've got a shorter time on this earth, Is that really what I want to be doing? To be honest with you, I mean, let's be real. Do you want to pound foolish penny or penny short pound foolish kind of comments? I always mess that one up, but it's so true. Or do you want to set it up where you can drive and know like, I'm going to make driven, data-driven decisions to support myself so I can have a well-balanced life?

Yeah. Why did you go into business?

It's the greatest question ever, right? Why?

You know, if you're going to torture yourself, you know, I don't get it.

Well, real challenges, they're real challenges for all businesses, but they're really, you know, for us, what we see specific to the legal practice, it's pretty interesting.

Let me put it this way. If your trust account's out of balance because you did your own finances, that's an issue that's got a significant penalty to it if you don't do it the right way. So why put yourself in that place?

Well, with the rule changes too in the state of California that can do random, you don't have to have a reason. You can have a random, or to your point, Linda, you brought this up, malpractice insurance. So it goes back to when you're, you're hiring a new attorney. What state do they live in? Are they authorized in your state? What is the malpractice insurance for that? How does that look? All of these little criteria that need to come together. I mean, yeah. So Steve, I— you're right, costs are a huge section that you probably drive into first. I just start of what's the front end, what— where's my front door, right? And then how do I build the rest of it? So.

Well, you know, back to what you were saying about hourly rates, Linda. So there, you know, one key thing to look at there is, are you billing in 10-minute increments? Are you billing in 7-minute increments? You know, this is lawyer talk now. I mean, That's what they do. And how can you tweak that? And you don't know until you really keep track of your billable and non-billable time, guys.

Yes.

Not every firm that I worked in, as their, their accountant or their CFO, whatever I was called, I looked at their hourly billing and their non-billables. And if they weren't keeping track of their non-billable time, I pushed really hard on that because I wanted to know for productivity and KPIs and all of that. What was the non-billable time and why? Not to, not to expose people or beat them up. There's a reason. Maybe one of them is the rainmaker. And so they don't, they don't really bill that many hours, but their non-billable time while they're out making rain for the firm should be tracked because it's got to be worth something. And what are they, what stones are they turning over? And you can study that in their non-billable time and, you know, see what, what's going to be profitable, profitable and what's not and so on. So.

Thumbs upping you. I don't know how you did that, Sarah.

You didn't even have your hands up.

I know, I was like, hmm, I'm just holding—

Her computer liked what I said. So, you know, what you were saying was with hourly time, I mean, there are ways to tweak this. And those, those are some of the mistakes that people make, is not really stopping and looking at what makes up all that business and how do we bill it and/or not.

Yeah.

I mean, really, it comes down to, can you implement better technology? Can you add paying by credit card? Can you modify your bill paying, your invoicing, your billing? You don't have to only bill in the beginning of the month. You can bill multiple times a month. Like, people think that traditional method, but sometimes if you need cash flow, you might wanna have a secondary billing time and then following up and collecting on that because, you know, you start to do some of those KPIs, you get your Um, realization rate, the real amount you got paid opposed to what you build out. I mean, those are important metrics, which is all of this really, the real financial challenges and how we solve them. You gotta hire us.

Yeah, you have, you have to have the professional to help. Exactly. You need an outside perspective. You need, and it's important, like we said in the beginning, in, or somewhere in the middle of this is if you're going to have these key people, Then really invest your time to move it forward. Like, don't just pay for— I'm paying a consultant just to have a consultant or a coach to have a coach.

Yeah. Don't throw money out the door for something like that. If you're gonna commit to a coach, commit to taking the advice of the coach. If you're gonna pay all that money, make sure you follow through. Don't just say, you know, I need 20 reports. And then you ask, what are you learning from them? Or why do you ask? Why do you need that report? And they go, I have no clue why. They, they just said I have to have this. They don't even know why they're asking for a report. That's not a good coach.

That's not a good—

yeah. Well, when you hire that coach, you need to put in the contract that they have to come up with a return on investment report at the end.

And that's hard for them because, like I said, a lot of these coaches give great advice, but if the student doesn't implement it, their hands are tied. They're not going to really be able to push them.

So to what I was saying, though, then what that coach does at the end is say, in their report, this is what I recommended. This is what it would have done for you.

Yeah.

Right.

This is what it would have done. And if you still will do it, this is what it, you know, and so you see a return on investment there because so often a coach will, you know, I'm going to be on their side right here, right now. So often they'll go in and they'll do their work, but then nothing gets done. And they get the, they get, you know, they get the bad rap for it. You know, and sometimes they put a lot of work into this.

Yeah, there is a lot of work that goes into— the other thing too is you have to be comfortable with what's being asked too. If you don't have knowledge, that's your point, Linda, you're not sure of the reports that you're needing. Um, Steve, what you're saying is like, it, it can't be a reflection of that. You've got to look at yourself, right? And so you also have to feel comfortable. Are you okay with raising rates right now or not? If it impacts your bottom line in a certain way, or are you okay with making strategic changes in your employee roster if you have evaluated everyone? Or if we're asking about your technology set and you're just like, this is just how it is, this is how it is, and we're like, no, it's actually better over here and we see it very clearly. So there's only so much anybody in the consulting side, advisory side can do. You have to want to be able to be open to it. I personally will say Linda and I experienced this in our own firm of recent, and we went through— we, we tried something, we plateaued, and we realized what we— we didn't know what we didn't know, and we didn't know what we wanted. But because we tried it, we understood.

Sure.

It's a little bit of a cost transition. It's a cost burden that we laid out all this time and energy into. But in the long run, we see this with a different vision. We see what we're looking for, and we understand it better.

And we're excited for it, Sarah. And we're excited to move forward and, you know, yeah, growing and having a plan to have it work in a particular way. And hopefully we'll all lay it out and it will work, and we'll be sitting here a year from now going, wow, glad we did that.

So grateful we did this. But yeah, so yeah, I mean, I, I think we— I think we've highlighted so many not just daily challenges, but overall challenges, what we see in firms in a high level, and, and kind of some nitty-gritty tips and tricks inside of there too.

It's so easy not to see the forest for the trees when you're in the business, in the grind every day. So yeah, these, these hopefully for all of you out there listening and watching this, you'll, you'll something, you'll go, aha, some nugget will come out of this for today because we're passionate about it when we work with you.

And we geek out in it.

Yeah, we geek out on it. I love that.

Yeah.

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It was an amazing—

it was a good one.

Yeah, I love it. And thanks AI for helping us out.

Thank you, everyone. Bye-bye, everybody.

Bye-bye.