The Three Best Desk Upgrades for Accountants

As accountants, we will spend so much time at our desks over the course of our lives. Just think about the number of hours we're going to spend sitting at our screens, which is what makes our battle station, our desk, our monitor setup, our peripherals, all the stuff that's in front of you right now. It's what makes our battle stations so important.

I'm going to run you through what are three of three of the best purchases I ever made for my desk setup. Each of them individually life-changing. That's not an exaggeration.

But that's not all. Today we're talking about uh an accounting firm that's actually found a pretty cool niche. Could give you some ideas. We're going to run through the firm's tech, the firm's positioning, and how the firm makes money. That's not all, though. We're going to talk about why there hasn't been a a major competitor to in it yet in our space. We'll talk about my favorite marketing tools for accounting firms. Even get into Canopy versus Carbon. Gang, this is going to be an action-packed episode. Come on in. Let's do it.

Okay, if you're new here, welcome along to Jason Onirms podcast where we talk about all things running accounting firms. From how to launch your own firm to how to run a better firm to how to get your boss to make XYZ decision, but also how to have the ultimate desk setup for accounting. I know, one of the coolest one of the coolest sentences that's ever been uttered. I'm a real I'm a real computer dork. If you haven't uh if you haven't noticed, I was like building PCs in middle school. I've always been very into computer computer and tech things if that wasn't plainly obvious.

But I want to speedrun you through through three things that most people don't use that made a huge impact on my experience sitting at a desk. We are not far into 2026 and I think sometimes we just lose perspective of just how many hours we will subject our big accountant bodies to sitting in a chair. Usually the the cheap one that was on clearance at Staples hunching just absolutely shrimping over our keyboards. Have you seen that that meme that's like a picture of a shrimp which is just like fully curved around the back sitting at a computer working at a desk? We are just fully hunched over our our keyboards working like man in tax season early in my tax career. I I pumped in 100 hour weeks. And I don't I don't mean to say that with even a whiff of pride even though I think there was a little bit. But we can literally roll out of bed, rock up to the machine at like 7 a.m. and clock out at 900 p.m. And let me tell you, I'm not a I'm not a anthropologist, but these human bodies, they they were not made to be that stationary.

So, the first purchase that I I can say I hated for years, drove me nuts before I eventually did it myself was, and I'm I don't even want to say it, but here we are. A desk treadmill. I know, boo. I don't It's so dumb. It's walking. Is that even exercise? Stop it. And then you get on like a Zoom call with somebody that's on a treadmill and you're like, "Wow, okay, cool. Yeah, you're trying harder than the rest of us."

Here's the thing. As I've gotten more serious about my health over the last year or two though, I found like the thing my body and my brain, by the way, turns out both those things are connected. Turns out one of the biggest things for me has been like just taking breaks and walking. And I hate it's such boring dumb advice, especially walking after meals. It as is especially a good idea because of science. I won't get you too into like your glycogen stores and all that stuff, but having it having one of these little treadmills. And if you haven't seen them, they're just they're a normal treadmill without all the bits in the front cuz you got to be able to scooch it under your desk. And some of them are like collapsing like they get smaller if you don't have a ton of space. But it's I mean it's otherwise it's what it sounds like. It is a treadmill that goes under your desk. You have to stand and walk on it. You don't just wheel along in your wheelie chair. And it pairs very nicely with a standing desk, which isn't in my list of three things. Probably should have been. It just felt like too boring of a selection. You got a standing desk, then when you hop on the treadmill, you just you raise the desk up and you're literally walking around like walking along as you're working, which initially I thought I would surely fall over and hurt myself, but you kind of get used to it. You get the coordination. Now, the way better thing to do is to get out from behind your computer and go walk around outside, but I know you well enough to know that you won't do that. And so, the next better thing is the under desk treadmill. Get in the habit of like hopping on it. Uh, definitely each time after you eat, but also if you're like anytime you're taking an internal meeting makes a really really big difference. And I I by the end of running an accounting firm, like I was genuinely living with like some psychological guilt of I'm I'm like hiring people to come and do this, which is like an incredibly sedentary thing. And if I don't like push the people on my team, their default will be to sit at a computer 8 to 10 hours a day, which is not a good thing for anybody. I It is like I'm turning these people into chain smokers, basically. And I made fun of the whole desk treadmill thing for years. It's good. It's I don't know if it's good. It's necessary. It's got to be some I mean for all the upside and the excitement and the fun and the glory that comes with being an accountant. It is one of those tradeoffs where because we're not doing construction work now. I got to find another way to move. If you got any specific brands that you like, I'm not like over the moon with mine. If you got any under desk treadmill brands that you like, pop that stuff in the comments.

Okay. Second desk purchase that I will swear by. You may have heard me say this before. Most accountants will live two lives. Their second life begins when they purchase high quality monitor arms. These are arms that attach to your desk and hold your monitors up. I'm not talking about the Amazon special, okay? Because the entrylevel monitor arms, which might be all you've ever experienced are awful. You get if you type like me, you really get humming on that keyboard and those things are just bouncing all over the place. You can hardly track them with your eyes. That's not the type of monitor arm I'm I'm talking about. Myself personally, I don't mean to brag, I will only buy Ergotron uh monitor arms. They are super beefy. Not the cheapest, that's for sure, but they've got no bounce. That is the one thing that I can't stand is if the desk moves a little bit, your monitor starts bouncing all over the place.

Here is the magic of monitor arms. As opposed to just leaving your monitor on the stand or putting it on some sort of god- aful Amazon special like quad grid of like four of them, and he can never really line up the corners just right. The power of a monitor arm is when you get that monitor uh up off of your desk, you now unlocked a new plane of movement. That is up down movement with your monitor. And most like monitor stands that come with a monitor. They can slide up and down a little bit, but not very much. Never actually far enough to be level with your eyes or even slightly above your eyes. This is actually a scientific thing. This is so lame. But humans as we evolved like we are used to seeing sky and like light above our eyes and that is a signal for our bodies to be alert. It is like oh the sun is up and we are now outside. If you're an accountant what is the biggest light source you are going to be dealing with. I can tell you it's not going to be the sunshine cuz you're not outside. Believe it or not your eyes either looking downward or upward will make a difference on your general levels of energy and and alertness. And as you can imagine, the best thing is actually for your eyes to either be looking straight ahead or even a little bit up. But if your monitor is just sitting on the stand that it came on, you're perpetually looking down. And I know this sounds like hookum, but this is real. This can this can actually impact your energy levels. Even just from an ergonomic standpoint, it's much better better to be looking at something that is not down. Like we've got enough problems hunching over the keyboard and looking down on our smartphones and all that. That is a huge benefit of monitor arms, being able to get your monitor higher. But I haven't even gotten to the biggest benefit. The biggest benefit is you get your desk back. When you don't have the stand that your monitor's sitting on at the front of your desk, you have so much more room for activities. Literally, you can stick your arm straight out to the end of the desk in front of you. You can fill that with with files and chachki and all sorts of stuff. So, your desk itself, uh, it can either be not quite as deep or you just got a bunch more real estate to fill it with all sorts of mess. I may be sounding hyperbolic here. This is a big deal, okay? And I know you're probably using multiple monitors. My move here was usually a single uh Ergotron double monitor arm where it has like two arms. I really didn't like going beyond two monitors. I was up to like five at one point. Two big high quality monitors honestly ought to be good enough. And when I say high quality, I mean like high resolution, so you can fit a lot of stuff on the screen. If I was going back to like being in production doing accounting work, I'd be rolling an Ergotron double monitor arm. So all of those both of those monitors are are held up over my desk attached to the desk from a single point. Like there's like a clamp that the the the arms are attached to. You know what I'm saying?

Okay. Third and final uh desk upgrade. I think I've only ever talked about this in my newsletter. A CO2 monitor. That is carbon dioxide. That is the stuff you make when you breathe out. You want to go full conspiracy theory? Listen to this. So, OSHA, which is like the sort of safety occupational health uh group in the United States, honestly, not really sure what they do. Feels like they've let us down a bit in the past, but they have like thresholds for what is a healthy level of CO2 in a room because beyond a certain level of CO2, obvious like too much CO2 can literally kill you. But there's a level beyond which your brain can't really like operate at its ideal capacity. And it is something like over I think it's over a thousand parts per million. But there's a huge percentage of workplaces and even homes where the normal CO2 level is just that or more. And it's made worse when you have someone working in a closed space for an extended period of time. Sounds an awful lot like an accountant doing accounting, right? And the first time I heard this, I was like, "Wait a minute. You're telling me there's like this this magic particle in the air that makes my brain not work good, and I might have just wasted two decades of my life accounting with one arm behind my back because the CO2 levels in the room were too high." Yes, that is what I'm telling you. And until you have a CO2 monitor, you don't know what your CO2 level in your room is. I'll show you mine for the video viewers. Let me grab it. I'll put a link uh to this down in the show notes. So, it's just a little box that I keep on my desk. Right now, CO2 levels in this room are 635. And this house that I'm in right now is the best from like a central air standpoint is the best house I've ever had as far as like circulating air and keeping fresh air in the room that I work in. the two houses that I've last lived in, unless I opened a window, if I was working in that room for more than 2 hours, CO2 parts per million would go over 1,000, which according to OSHA, your brain is not working at its optimal capacity when you're over 1,000. Now, if I go back even further to the crotchety, awful old accounting firm offices that I worked with, I could tell you the CO2 level. I mean, if I just think about how long I had to smell the burrito that the guy across the hall got and the fact that that would hang around in the office until 3:00 in the afternoon for a number of reasons. I just think about some of those offices that I worked in. There was no world where the air quality in the office I was working in was healthy and it was like a real kind of good old boy sort of work environment. So they're like, "Yeah, no, you don't need windows. You're an accountant."

But if I'd gone to them and be like, "Hey, here's the deal. Like here's actually some science and and you could look into this further like percentage brain capacity that is lost at sort of these different CO2 levels. Like it's real. If I'd gone to my bosses and said like, "Hey, here's the deal. probably working 30% slower in this environment as opposed to if we could figure this out. All of a sudden the powers of the be are like okay maybe this is actually something that we need to invest in because it has a very real effect on people and so if I mean if there were a pill that I could give you right now where I could say take this pill and you will be 20% more productive you'd be like give it to me brother shoot it in my shoot it in my veins. In fact, that's such a good idea we might want to work on that. Can you write that down? That sounds like a great creator business to build. But if I could give you a pill that made you 20% more productive, you would take it. And this whole CO2 thing, it's probably the closest thing to that because I would hazard a guess just in my own personal experience, more of the environments that I worked in had unhealthy levels than did not. And that's that's probably the the case for many accountants. This CO2 monitor that I have, there's like cheaper ones that I I don't know. People say you can't really trust. This one was like 140 bucks or something like that. But if I could push the accounting profession to do one thing, a single thing to increase the productive output of the accounting profession, it would literally probably be this. Like I'm not even kidding. It would be understand CO2 levels and like what your work environment looks like. Because even if you're in an environment where it's not very good, there's steps that you can take to improve it from like opening windows to um at my last place, I just I had to have my HVAC always on circulate. And oftentimes it just it wouldn't run because it wouldn't be heating or cooling. But if I left the fan on, I would get much better fresh air where I worked than if I had it off. I wouldn't have known that had I not seen the light.

Okay. [music] So, this last fall, we did a a tour of 13 cities, host of workshops for over a thousand accounting firms, and I bumped into a lady at one of these events, and she said, "Uh, this week, I have four new hires starting from this podcast sponsor, Cloud Accountant Staffing." To be clear, she didn't say in the context of that conversation, this episode sponsor, she just said Cloud Accountant Staffing. Four people starting at the same Can you imagine? I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy, but you know what? Cloud accountant staffing makes it possible. Uh back in my firm, we hired both onshore folks and offshore folks. Try to get the best of both worlds because there's problems to just doing one or the other. Cloud accountant staffing, they're going to help hold your hand through this stuff. It's actually founded by a former accounting firm owner. And so all the questions around what about security? What about it? What about do I have to disclose this to my clients? They can help walk you through all that stuff. And one of the coolest new things I've seen in staffing recently, they launched a portal where you can see all of the candidates they've already prevetted. And even from that portal, you can book an interview. You literally just have to give them your email address and you get access to the portal. You can see the tax talent, the accounting talent, the executive assistants, all these folks. They've sourced. They've done like some personality assessments for them and you can book an interview with these candidates directly from that portal. Super cool. If you're building out the squad for 2026, it's worth giving it a serious thought. That's cloud accountant staffing. Learn more at the link down in the show notes.

Hey, if you've got any clients that have to do like ugly project tracking or have any degree of inventory management or big ugly invoices like the type you see from construction companies that are a mile along and have all this item detail, then my brother, this episode sponsor, Makershub, it is for you. even if you don't do the accounting is a big one to share with your client because truly the area of accounting that has been most turned on its head by AI is accounts payable and it's not even close. We had some big meaty bill pay engagements we did with clients where I truly could have automated 80% of what we were doing with Makershub. The extraction quality is so far beyond what OCR could ever do. And because it can now pull all like every little fiddly detail from the invoice in a totally automated way. Like like by the way we I think we're actually very close to fully automated extraction which people have been saying for over a decade. You don't have to review the bills anymore. It's like really cuz my job is to do the bills and if there's an extra zero that slips in there I'm going to lose my job. Feels like we're actually getting close to fully automated extraction. But because it can pull all those details really well, you can then build all sorts of automated workflows on top of that for like really complex approvals. And we're talking more than just like pull the date and the amount from the invoice. We're talking about every single little fiddly detail in the item like itemized list. This is crazy. MakerShub, we did some examples on a demo uh on YouTube where it was even pulling handwritten text accurately. Crazy stuff. Even if this is not something you're doing for your clients, if you have clients that are doing gnarly billing and and inventory management, all this stuff, Makershub, a lot of people that are raving fans of it because it just takes the level this stuff can be automated like just to another level. How many times did I just say level? Okay, you know what to do next? Learn more down at the link in the show notes. If you got a client you want to share this with, I would say either send them the landing page or send them one of the demos we've done on my YouTube channel and in like seven minutes they can get a sense of what it is. That's it. That's the ad read.

Hey, real quick. If you use Microsoft Outlook or Gmail in your accounting firm, pay real close attention to what I'm going to tell you next. This podcast sponsor, Missive. It is email like you have always wanted. It is a team first approach to managing email. Would you believe me if I told you Microsoft Outlook, which came out, I think we worked it out, it was premill for me. Microsoft Outlook, it is not the best like email platform for accounting firms. That may come as a shock to you. And when we're spending [music] a huge percentage of our time on email, accountants on average in my polling spend one to two hours a day just managing email, it means the tool you use for email is incredibly important. Missive, uh, over 500 accounting firms have moved their email to Missive. We did a demo of Missive on my YouTube channel a few months back. People freaking flipped. In fact, I made a social post at a sponsored social post a couple days later. Over 50 people opted to hop in on a demo like a little showand tell that we were doing the next week from an accounting firm that's been running all their email on missip for the last few years. Some practice management systems will manage your email inbox but most of them all they do is connect to it which is great so I can see the emails associated with my client records but it is not a like productive place to be composing and managing email by any stretch of the imagination. missive. It is the inbox tool for teams built from the ground up to make you more productive with this stuff and give you a path to like delegating email work for the first time, too. I'm a big fan of the tool. To learn more about Missive, check out that demo on my YouTube channel, then head on down to the show notes to learn more.

Tackling some pretty big brain stuff here today, gang. But we are just getting started. Up next, we're going to roast a firm. Roast a firm. Roast [music] a firm. Let's roast a firm on Jason on firm.

As the jingle suggested, we are roasting a very real accounting firm here. They submitted a bunch of details about their firm to me anonymously. I'm going to walk you through them. Gives us a chance to kind of put the coach hat on and and look at the other person's firm and be like, "Yeah, if I was in their situation, how would I advise them?" If you want me to roast your firm, there's there's a form down in the show notes. Complete that form. Can't promise that I'll get to everybody, but drop your details down there and you may be included in a future episode.

Okay, this firm, we're going to talk about their clients, namely how to find some better ones. We're going to talk about their tech and we're going to talk about money, how they can make more of it, hopefully through less hopefully with even less effort. Okay, I'll tell you about this is a Wii firm, a solo firm owner. They're doing 100 grand a year. Still pretty new to this. 80% of the work is is tax work. A lot of the stuff we're going to talk about today, though, really doesn't have anything to do with tax. So they're in the suburbs of a large city and they've got a large number of schedule C delivery services. So delivery services are basically like professional like limousine drivers, that sort of things. Hang on, not that are basically like private car services. So not not like Uber, but this person is licensed to chauffeer people around. You got a VIP coming in. You just can't be bothered to deal with the riff raff of Uber and you need you need that more premium touch. That's usually what delivery services look like. But there's a bunch of different phases of this from the people who are getting into it for the first time to the people who are maybe out growing just themselves for the first time and building a team. As with any industry that you get into, there's all sorts of different levels and milestones these people get into. But then there's an entire ecosystem around them of like tech providers and the people that do the licensing and like all the different stuff, the insurance companies, there's a whole ecosystem around those individuals serving that industry. So they said large number of schedule C delivery services. If you're not in the states, schedule C is basically just the most simple small business tax filing essentially. No employees. It's just them. I think I mentioned they're doing 100 grand a year. Their workflow throughout the year looks pretty normal for a for a US tax shop. They're getting most of the tax work done by April 15th. They said May and June are are taken up by folks who weren't able to get their work in any earlier. But after that, it looks like really just proactive planning. So they're doing withholding analysis. They're handling some ad hoc stuff from clients, but they're doing a little bit of bookkeeping, not very much, but largely like advisory and tax planning work from about the half year on. Now, pricing, uh, their pricing was so low that they were afraid to even share it. But basically, for tax returns, they generally give a price upfront that's not high enough. And then for more one-off open-ended projects, they'll charge hourly. All of their sales and marketing right now is only happening through referrals. We're going to talk about that. their tech stack, what they're using. Drake for their tax software, they've got a secure portal, like standalone app that's not an accounting firm app, and Excel. A lot of people hear that, three apps in their tech stack, and they're like, "That sounds nice. That feels that feels ever so far away." So, what they most dislike right now is tax resolution work, especially having to work with the IRS because they're such a nightmare right now. What they most enjoy is helping clients understand that complex tax situations can actually be fairly straightforward and painless if they keep on top of them and pull in good professional help.

Okay, first things first. Good for you, brother. $100,000 business. There was a day in your life where if you could have seen yourself right now and been like, "That dude runs a $100,000 business himself. That guy is epic." Great news. That's you. You got there. You did it. Now, on the other side of that doesn't always feel how you thought it was going to feel, right? You get to the top of that mountain and you realize, "Oh gosh, there was another bigger there's an even bigger mountain over there that I didn't realize. I'm having fun in some ways, but now I'm sad in a new way that I didn't know I could be." All right, that was too much.

Okay, let's talk about this firm's clients, its tech, and how it makes money. First, it's clients. I'm getting the impression from this submission that they're kind of like bumping up against capacity a bit already. And and the big capacity constraint for this firm obviously is going to be tax season. Hardest thing in in managing an accounting firm is every accounting firm whether you're in the US or not whether you do tax or books or anything else. We're all dealing with our own version of cyclicality where we've got this bottleneck at one point in the year, one point in the month where we can only do so much and that constraint limits the entire business. When I came up in tax firms growing up, I freaking spun in my chair for entire summers on end because we don't have anything that I could do. And so I would just make up work. I'd be like, "Hey, I see that over there. Can I work on that?" And they're like, "Knock yourself out. We don't have anything else for you to do." And it is one thing that like makes running a solo tax firm actually kind of great is you can get a tremendous amount of flexibility. But worth acknowledging kind of the biggest trap in managing your client list when it comes to accounting firms is getting to the point where you're so busy that you stop taking on new clients. This is a tremendous trap and and most firms will wear it as a badge of pride. We no longer take on new clients presumably because we're so popular and we just have so many people to serve. The trouble is the day that you do that, your business stagnates because your business is only ever going to be as good as your client list. We like to pride ourselves in the technical work and the systems and the workflows and we geek on all the stuff and the technology and I'm I fully geek on that stuff, too. But the reality of running a better business is getting to a better place means having a better client list. And this is the danger of saying we don't take new clients anymore is the day you is the day that you stop taking new clients is the day that you stop taking better clients. Nobody's too busy to find a better client. Better clients solve all of our problems from capacity to not making enough money. The solution to all of these problems is is better clients. And so if I look at this firm, how do we find better clients? Probably a combination of better and more because they're still very early days. If you ever went out and started a firm and you think back to where you were when you were generating 100 grand a year in revenue for the first time, that client list, it's made up of like whoever would give you money to do that work. Like you're still putting food on the table at this stage. $100,000 topline in your own business does not equate to a very big W2 salary. Like this is at this point, this individual is making pretty average money going and working at a public accounting firm. Now I one can argue they have you know way more agency with this. It's a thing that they own and that's all amazing. Different set of skills for sure building your own business. But at this stage in building a firm that client list like recognize there's a lot of folks there you're going to have very deep connections with because you have this affinity for them being your first like they were some of the first clients in the door and so you love them to death. But this can also be the trap when we bring these people forward forever because we have this affinity and this appreciation for them. We're like, I don't want to get too big for my britches. These people were were with me from the beginning. I can't kick them to the curb. And so what most firms will do or most firm owners is they'll be like, well, we just need to hire. That's the solution here. And then you get to the point where you're at your wits end and you got too much to do and you are you are so busy that you're like, h something has to give. I guess I'll hire. And so you go out to hire and you're like,"hm, turns out hiring is actually a lot of work and now I have even less less time to get the actual work done." Then you finally find the person you want to you want to hire and you bring them in and you're like, "Lando Lakes, it takes a lot of time to train another human being. What am I supposed to work on my own stuff now? I got to manage and train this person." Then you get seven months into it and you're like, "Ah, they've turned up to work drunk like two weeks in a row now. I but I really don't want to throw seven months of work out on this. Welcome. Welcome to being an employer. Ton of fun. Except when it isn't. Hiring when you reach capacity does not solve the underlying problem. It gives you another job to do. Biggest hiring mistake that most entrepreneurs make is they hire for growth rather than hire for what they're doing. Because if that next hire doesn't take any work off of your plate, all you just did is sign up for another job. You now have to manage another person. And at the end of the day, whose time in the business is more important than yours? Nobody's. Like, that's the most important time to get back. But that's not what we do. Usually, we make the hire for like the cheapest clients, like the people that we no longer want to work with. But in most firms, you will back yourself into a financial corner because those early clients are not paying you enough money to be able to then pay someone to do that work and still make a profit. So, you take in this super discounted work because you're like, man, I'm just I just got to escape the W2 job and working for somebody else. So, I'll take this work in the door for really cheap. And you know, your next client's a little bit more, a little bit more, a little bit more, and then you get to capacity and you've got all this work that doesn't pay you well enough to be able to pay someone else to do the work. But then you're also like, ah, these people were with me from the beginning. I don't want to let them go. Like, something's something's got to give. Like, you got to do one or the other or both. The great news is there's always somebody out there who's even more more happy than the folks you have on the client list today to pay you more than any of those people are paying you today. Like someone's willingness to pay you ultimately boils down to do they have money to pay and how much do they value the work that you're doing. And there is always someone out there who is even happier to pay you even more.

If you now this firm is working with uh liberty services I think is how you'd say it. So, how do we get in front of more folks who would be great fit clients within this space? Well, right now they're fully reliant upon referrals. And this can be a trap, especially early days in running your firm, because that person that's getting a screaming deal, when they refer somebody to you, that person's going to expect the same screaming deal. And that's not always what you want. So, the best place to start with building a better client list in any firm is, and this is uncomfortable, proactively asking for referrals, but only from your very best clients. Because if you look at your entire client list, and you think about who your A clients are, and your A clients are not just the clients that you like the most, they are the clients who, yes, you like, but also are the happiest to pay you a really big number. And sometimes you don't even understand why they're so happy to pay that big number. like they almost have to convince you that they are worth what they are paying, right? And so you've got these people on your client list that value you tremendously as opposed to the C and D clients like the people who complain even when you mark down the bill. Those A clients, they value you tremendously. Imagine if your entire client list was those A clients. That would change your life. I mean that would be completely different. And the reason why the best place to start to find a better client for every firm is asking those A clients for referrals is most A clients know other A clients and they're the fastest path to more people like them. And so what is a non-sc that doesn't have to feel uncomfortable. Recognize like as you're giving these people business advice like they know that you run a business too and like the right people are not going to be weirded out by supporting you. they're going to be like, "No, I'm actually really happy to help." And so to me, like this message looks something like, "Hey, uh, full transparency, like we are doubling down on trying to build our accounting firm around people pretty much exactly like you. Like we love working with people like you and we're trying to pull in another five people like you by the end of this quarter. Do you have any other friends or like where do these people hang out where you think we could get in front of more of these folks?" And most I mean your clients most of the time are going to be like, "Oh yeah, no, let me connect you with Jim, Pam, Steve, and actually I'm gonna be at this thing next Thursday. You should totally come and you can meet a bunch of people." Again, the really important thing here is that we're doing this with our best clients, our tippy top clients, where we would love to have 10 times as many of those very best clients. We're not leaving it open to all and letting anybody refer because in my experience when you do that you actually get more referrals from the D and the C clients because they know they're getting a screaming deal when all I want is referrals from the A clients. So first tip to this firm is let's go out and proactively ask for referrals from our very best clients right now.

Second tip is within livery services there has to be all sorts of software platforms specifically tailored to the solo operators who are doing this stuff you know who are invoicing people for rides and and all that stuff for people who are building teams of drivers and doing that sort of like fleet management of of not only the cars but also like where is everybody right now and that software to kind of help me do the dispatch when I've got another ride I got to sort about all that stuff. There's got to be a load of tech built for these businesses. And often times buddying up with the tech partners in the space is a great way to put you and what you do on blast. If you think about who has the most money to spend on marketing almost always, it is venture-backed software companies who are like trying to get into that vertical and find traction. They're just hemorrhaging cash, showing up at every conference they can, running ads and all that. And every single one of those companies has a content problem where like they need authoritative people that can put together useful things. And you as a CFO, as as a tax professional, whatever that looks like, you can bring that really valuable, rich content to the software company, be that trusted, really smart voice and then they can use that marketing budget to amplify the things that you're saying and sort of your identity. The goal if we're if we're building a niche accounting firm, by the way, kudos to this firm so early on in their journey finding a specific type of person they want to serve. The goal running a niche accounting firm is we think it is to be like the premier technical expert within a domain and for sure we should strive to do that but technical expertise is not what normies make buying decisions on like non-accountants the muggles that are coming to us to like buy tax services or accounting services they don't understand anything about what we do so they will make buying decisions based on what they do understand which is how they perceive us our firm and our expert And as much as this grinds our gears as like technical people, it means the most important thing is not technical capability, it is honestly our visibility in the space. Like do we just look like the go-to solutions provider for this type of company? Are we more visible than anybody else in the space so that the next time you have to find a new solutions provider, you're like, "Oh yeah, no, they are they are the shop for this type of work." That's just who you go to. Like the goal is to be inevitable. And I I point to this example often. You go to YouTube right now and search for anything accounting firm related, you're going to see a ton of my videos. Like like me or not, I'm unavoidable. That's what we're trying to get to. And software companies with their marketing budgets can be really useful partners to put us out in front of a bunch of people.

Third suggestion here specifically with this niche is look at the licensing bodies. This is something where I think every state has their own version of licensing where you got to go through some sort of course or something like that to have the license to be able to be a chauffeur. And often times like there's ways to partner and provide free resources and all that from like you know a free resource around how do I prepare my tax return for the first time? Like I'm self-employed and I never have been before. How do I do that? Be the person to make that resource. Not that long ago, we did a a roast a firm like this for a firm that works with uh grocery stores, a specific grocery chain. And every basically franchise owner, that's not the correct vernacular in this case, but you know what that means. Every franchise owner has to go through all of these different courses. And there's one course on accounting and tax in order for them to be eligible to own one of these grocery stores. And twice a year this grocery train flies out this accounting firm owner to teach this class. Uh and they shared with me they close about 70% of the people that go through that program. And so they've now got an entire firm several million dollar firm that only works with this one grocery store like the owners of the grocery stores in this chain. So always be looking for what those choke points are within a niche where all those folks are having to get funneled through one place. My mind here goes to licensing bodies. Is there a way we can provide value to the state? This is not like doing a rev share with the state or selling something like this is just providing value and trusting the fact that when they see us, you then become the default option when they need more help, right?

Okay. Last suggestion here to find better clients. Find the influencers. Every category has influencers. Somebody out there is like documenting the journey of building their own business for the first time. There's consultants in every single space. Um, in many ways I think influencer influencers are kind of just the new consultants at least in the B2B context and the business facing stuff like what we do here. But find the influencers because that is that is where people collect and and sort of come to learn and right or wrong there's just a lot like a a problematic level of trust that is given to influencers when it comes to tell me what to get X Y or Z.

[music] Hey, real quick. Are you tired of having to like duct tape a whole bunch of apps together to run your accounting firm? Of course you are. Would it be nice if you had you [music] had what you needed all in one place? Gang, listen up. This is where today's sponsor, Financial Sense, can make your life a whole lot easier. It's everything you need to run your firm all in one place. But they recently started shipping some really cool workflow stuff. It has a deep integration [music] into the accounting ledger. It will actually pull all the transactions in so you can do more of your month-end review from inside of Financial Sense. And it'll even auto flag a bunch of stuff like big transactions, inconsistent transactions. It's got kind of a whole month-end review flow that you now go through from inside of Financial Sense. Then you make those changes to the transactions. They all get pushed back to the ledger like magic, bro. So, one of the headaches right now in picking accounting tech is you have practice management systems that oversee the work. Then you have workflow tools that do the work. Financial sense doing a bit of both now. They've been a practice management system historically. Now they're getting more into the bookkeeping workflow, which is great news if you're the type of person that doesn't like juggling a whole bunch of tools. Now, Financial Sense, they'll actually give you a 14-day trial if you use the link down in the show notes. That is the most generous free trial I've actually seen in our space. Absolutely worth kicking the tires [music] on. To learn more, check out that link.

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Okay, that was the firm's clients. Let's talk tech and then let's talk money. The tech suggestion here, and this is an easy one. I'll take you back to what they said their tech stack was. They've got Drake for tax software. They use a a secure portal app that's some non-accounting thing and they use Excel. Uh biggest opportunity here, a practice management system. Even if you are a solo firm runner, there's no reason not to use a practice management system just to stay more organized. And then if you ever do pull someone else in to help, you've already got the infrastructure there to facilitate that. Like I cannot be talked out of this. Practice management systems have gotten so cheap. Like you can get a really good practice management system for like $25 a month. There's genuinely not a reason not to. And then that PM includes like the client-facing portal. It gives you a place to push requests to your clients in a centralized way and then will like automatically follow up with them until they get those requests back to you. That is an easy win. Only other tech suggestion I would make here because practice management system is a big rollout and that ought to be the focus in the near term. Only other suggestion I would make is actually tax resolution software. They said their their least favorite thing right now is tax resolution. I didn't I mean I was in I was doing tax work for over a decade before I even knew that there was software that will help you save a bunch of time and do your tax resolution work better. Like literally down to like what is the notice that you got? What are the optimal ways to respond to these notices in this scenario, that scenario, that scenario? Grab this template, send it out. Like these are software platforms built by former IRS auditors that have basically templatized the ultimate way to like respond to most notices. Like there's still room where you you're going to need to read between the lines and figure some things out in certain cases. But my process in every tax firm uh that I worked at was like you would go out and you would search the the network drive for like Microsoft Word files and be like, what's the most similar letter to the one I'm trying to write? That is not the optimized way to handle tax resolution. Like there's a right answer for how to respond to these notices because the agents, the people that receive the notices we send in, they have a specific set of rules where they can apply like yes, this is acceptable and this is not. And it means that there's then like an optimal way to respond to these notices. Uh the two leaders right now in the US I would say are probably um what is it? IRS IRS Tax Solutions, I think that's what it's called, and then uh Pitbull Tax Resolution. I'll put links to both of those down in the show notes if you want to look into those further.

Last for this firm. How does the firm make money and how can we make more of it? They mentioned they were sharing with just pricing stuff too low. Um, so the obvious answer here is don't put your big boy britches on. But one thing that helped me put on my proverbial proverbial big boy britches and and we actually talked about this the other day when we were talking about 1099 season is create a really good free DIY resource. Often times where we're taking rates that are not good enough, it's because we like we feel like we have to help out maybe the person that's not quite there yet or doesn't quite fit the folks that we're trying to serve and we think we're like helping out the community or or like putting positive karma out into the into the universe. And I just don't think this way. Like these are not usually the people in the world that are most in need of our help. The people that are most in need of our help like usually don't have any money to pay for that help. And those are the folks we should be helping, but we can't because we're serving all these like middling low bono clients that kind of pay us but kind of don't. Paying like 40% less than a normal client maybe. And before you know it, 30% of your client list is is those people. My first tip here, if you make a really, really good DIY resource for someone who's maybe getting into this business for the first time, never completed a Schedule C or done their accounting or anything like that. Create a free resource that's really good. Like put some effort into this to show them how to do that stuff themselves. Maybe it's free, maybe you put it, maybe it's a digital product and it's, you know, $100 or something like that. But you'll find when you make a really good cheap resource like this, you feel like it gives you more permission to then set the bar of entry, the price of entry to your firm a little higher. And then if people bulk at that, if they don't like that, then you're like, great, here's the DIY path. And what happens most of the time is they'll start down the DIY path and they will come back valuing you more because they now realize what it takes to get that work done. So if that helps you feel like uh you can feel better about increasing prices, absolutely do that.

Second tip that I would give you is, you know, you need to roll out price increases. Uh this is something I've stolen from uh uh Geraldine Carter, who's a coach to accounting firms. Usually when people do a price increase, they just send out like a letter to all their clients and they're like, "Here goes nothing." and hope this works. Instead, the best way to do this is actually to send out updated pricing to folks in batches. And the very best version of this is with three-tier proposals, but we won't get into that today. Let's just say that you are putting a single price in front of your clients and you know you need to increase the price quite a bit. It is yet another argument for giving clients prices upfront is when you need to increase prices pretty substantially. You can't do that after the fact. Like you can't bump somebody's price 30, 40% and then not tell them till after the work is done. So this is yet another argument to give people pricing upfront. But send that out to 20% of your clients. Don't send it out to 100% of your clients. That is a big old roll. The Dyson is not optimized. Better way to do this. Send this out to 20% of your clients. If everybody says yes and has no problem, the next 20%'s getting a higher price. If everybody says no, if if half the people bounce and you didn't want that, then we need to course correct. And that should change how we roll out the next batch. Right now, for whatever reason, folks, like we are like this this is like feels really unfair. Like just based on what batch you're in, you're going to pay a different price. The reality is this stuff is like happening all around us all the time. Like literally the price you'll pay when you're buying an airplane ticket to like I mean there's so many things that impact how we dynamically get prices for the things that we buy. But I think we can all agree picking a number or picking a percentage bump and blasting that to a 100% of clients that's what we most that's like what most of us do but is the most risky way to roll something like that out. I could we could do a whole tangent on three-tier proposals and how to price that and then send them out by batches. There's a whole game to dialing that in that is like can really optimize what folks will pay. We'll save that for another day cuz that gets pretty geeky.

Last segment we're going to tackle today. It's mailbag time. [music] >> Right, as the transition would suggest, I got a large bag of mail. These are messages I've gotten uh in in podcast comments, over email, in DMs, over text. Text me or leave me a voicemail at 516-980-4968. Country code one. We got a lot of you non-US listeners. Send your question. We'll try to cover it in the mailbag. Let's knock these out.

Hey Jason, hope you're having a great start to the year. I I don't know. The start of this year feels like when I was running an accounting firm and you get to January and you're like, "This again." I'll be honest. Start of this year has felt a little bit like that. I've been enjoying your show and look forward to possibly attending one of your Inerson events this year. Do it. Question for you. And I apologize if I missed something in what you've already covered. Gang, if you're asking me a question, you don't need to apologize if if you missed something. This godforsaken podcast has gone on for almost 600 episodes. I don't remember what I said two weeks ago. I'm not going to hold it against you if you missed anything. Here's a question. When you have CAS, client accounting services clients that you're doing monthly services for, but you also do their business tax returns, how would you bill them in your firm? What do you recommend? I've in the past included it as part of their monthly billing, but I've gone away from that for a few reasons. I'm now billing tax work separately from the bookkeeping work. What do you think? I can tell you what I did. Uh people poke around all sorts of different versions of this. Do I bundle the bookkeeping work with the tax work or do I sell those things independently? There's upsides and downsides to each. What I ultimately landed on, and to be clear, there is no perfect answer here. It's just trying to get to the least imperfect answer. What I landed on was we bill for the bookkeeping and the tax work in the calendar year. So if you pay me from January through December 2025, you've already paid for the tax return that I'm going to do in 2026. This also means if somebody starts with me in July, then they're going to pay for that pay for that tax work on a compressed schedule. So, often times when a client was starting with me, we would have an extra line on their monthly invoice that was a catch-up to cover the tax work if they weren't starting with us in January and then that would fall off at December once they were caught up and then we would reset the fee for the next year. Now, problems with this, what about if somebody leaves mid-year? You just have to have this spelled out in your engagement letter. What we spelled out is if you leave, that money paid towards your tax return is forfeit. You don't get that back because then you end up with a situation where it's like, well, what part of the monthly invoice should be prorated and credited back to me when I leave your firm? You don't want to play those patty-cakes. And so, if you're especially skittish about any sort of conflict around this stuff, then sure, carve out like the tax billing and just bill them when the tax return's done or bill half when it starts and the other half when it ends. One thing I would say don't do here, don't make the billing for the tax return really cheap. Oftentimes we'll be like, "Well, the tax return will be super quick and easy because we're doing the books and we'll just blow it through. It'll be so easy." It's only that easy because you're doing all the books. That easiness for you to prepare it has absolutely no bearing on the value of the person that's buying it from you. When you buy something, you don't go, "I wonder how much time this took them. Did it take them a lot of time?" Yeah, I do value that more than we don't do that. You may think about like, oh, a plumber had to spend three days on my house, so yes, I value that more. Maybe in that situation, but when you cruise through your credit card statement and you're like, "Okay, Netflix was $97 last month. How much time went into that? Do I value it that much?" Like, we don't do that. And so, our clients don't either. So, if you do carve out the tax portion, charge, I would say, more or less what it would be for someone to have their tax return done where you weren't doing their bookkeeping because that's more representative of the actual value of it.

Other flavors of this that I've seen is uh doing the same thing that I described but on a half-year cutoff. So what they pay you from July through the following June is actually for the tax portion but then the accounting portion is on the calendar year. To me that feels a little bit more convoluted. And then other people approach this as you're basically paying me every single month for me to care and for us to do your stuff. And the day that you stop paying us, we stop doing your stuff. Has your tax return been done? Has it not been done? Doesn't matter. It's basically just like not even a retainer because that implies it's like being applied to, you know, some sort of actual work that's happening. Uh there are firms that literally approach this as you have to pay me X dollars a month for us to just be supporting you and regardless of what's been done and what hasn't been done when you are dropped off that list, that's the end. And there's some really nice simplicity to that. There's just a little more communication uh struggles with the client there because oftentimes they don't think of what we do that way. Like they don't think we're this boutique boutique sort of agency. They think we're closer to a tradesperson where they are exchanging money for like us to do that thing. So while I like that approach, you just got to be careful in how you communicate it to your clients. Thanks for the question.

Uh hey Jason, love your stuff. Thank you for that. I'm wondering if you've ever done a Canadian available tech stack or recommendation onepager or podcast talking about it. That is a great question. Uh I sure haven't. And the reason is because I don't know the first thing about Canada. Couple years ago I moved to New York. Uh I grew up on the west coast. Moved to New York and by the time winter rolled around it was really cold. Like a just a profound level of cold that I wasn't ready for. My wife grew up in Minnesota. She's like, "Suck it up, big boy. Not a big deal." I'm like, "This is the worst." It is January and it hasn't been above freezing in two weeks. I put my home gym in the garage, uninsulated garage, go out there, 5 AM, touching metal stuff. I feel like that kid in A Christmas Story that sticks his tongue on the pole and it gets stuck. But that's me trying to exercise in the morning. Uh, went to barber in New York. Just met the guy. He's like, "Oh, where did you move here?" I'm like, "Yeah, from Oregon." He's like, "Oh, wow. Somehow the home gym came up." And he's like, "Yeah, I know. You're an idiot. It's cold here. You didn't think it would be cold in your garage gym? It's cold." I'm like, "That's what people did in Oregon." We moved to New York and my first thought after that winter was, "Why do people live here?" There was a day sometime in humanity's development where people came this far north and it was this cold and they're like, "I like this." But there were some of those people who still said, "You know what I'm going to do? I'm going to go even farther north." And those are what we call now Canadians. So, I'll be honest. I don't know the first thing about Canada, about Canadian tax stuff, about Canadian tech stuff.

I will tell you one thing that I wish would have happened more by now than uh it has is I wish there were more Jason Nonfirms copycats, people who are like, "Oh, he figured out how to make a business out of this. I could probably go do my own version of this." Gang, we need that. We need that in the US. We need a hundred more people doing what I do because people need to do this stuff just through a different worldview and lens than I have. Like we just need a greater diversity and perspective and and how to do all this cuz I'm great for some types of folks. But you know who would be even better for you is like the person that only you know does bookkeeping, the you know stay-at-home mom, young mom. Like there's so many different versions of this where you could do an even more powerful version of this for a more specific type of person. I think people just don't believe that you can make this into a business. You can take it from me. Internet grifting, it's real. Um, we need this stuff for auditors as well. We really do. I would love I mean I say this with some trepidation. I would love to pull more accountants into stuff like this doing your own version of this similarly into my company and what we build. Like we are hiring accountants who want to like get into writing and and social media and all that stuff even on a part-time basis to start. You you want to come work for my company, shoot me an email, shoot me a text. We got roles that we're hiring for and we're looking for people who are currently in practice wanting wanting to do something new. But no, I don't do Canadian stuff because honestly, I would just be pretending to know what I was saying. [music]

Hey, real quick, I want to invite you to my super excellent weekly newsletter. My newsletter was like the start of my thought leadership journey. It's where I try to collect what I think are the most important things for you to see every single week. Sent to you every Wednesday morning. Make sure you don't miss any of the good stuff, right? Increasingly, we're also building into that some like of the best evergreen thought leadership I've ever done. Trying to make that like the most action-packed, highest quality email you get to your inbox each week because listen, we're all busy. All right? You're not going to see every single little thing that I It's just too much. If you're not on my newsletter yet, check that out. jsononfirms.com or I'll put a link to it down in the show notes.

Hey, quick word from one of today's sponsors. Me. Me. Yes. I run a community. Realize that is for accounting firm owners. And Realize is kind of the secret behind how I've done all of my content and been able to like financially turn thought leadership into a business. About 100 firm owners in there. Realize is a systematic way to build connections with other peer firm owners. It's not a framework for how to run a firm. It's a way to introduce you to other super cool firm owners. Right now, we're putting together small groups so you can have a group of like five, six, seven other firm owners just like you that you meet with every single month, run very similar firms. Having this for me totally transformed firm running. My north star, like my goal for you coming into this group is to make a new best friend, somebody that runs a firm because that was what I needed in my journey. The whole community is built around that. It's called Realize. Link down in the show notes if you want to learn more.

Next question. Every CPA I know has serious issues and we can generalize CPA to accountants. Has serious issues with how Intuit treats us and our clients. Intuit, the makers of uh QuickBooks, TurboTax, all that. Why, for the love of God, has accounting power or some other practical anti-predatory solution built an alternative to QBO that we can actually use? Can't we all band together to make or promote something better? I believe the clients trust us and would listen. Lead the charge, man. Thank you for making a tough career fun. You're amazing. Thank you. That's a very kind very kind question. People have already happened. If you had to like say one alternative where this has happened, I would probably say it's Xero. Like there's been a ton of people in North America that prided them themselves in running Xero firms. Xero X-R-O. Xero made a big push into the US market in maybe 2015. They've been running Xero cons over here for quite a while. And there's a lot of accountants that are real fast to tell you, "We're a Xero firm." And it's as much about Xero as it is about not being Intuit. And I think it was back in 2018 uh when Intuit was really getting in trouble for all the Free File stuff and like the misleading marketing where they would tell you it was basically free to use their platform, but then they would ultimately charge you for it. That on top of like them running Super Bowl commercials that make tax pros look bad. We decided in our firm, we just don't want to use Intuit products anymore. And this was 2018. At the time, we were using Lacerte, a tax prep software made by Intuit. And I had to take over 20 tax staff and teach them a new tax software, which I would not wish on my worst enemy. And we we became a Xero first firm. So, I would say this has been possible for a long time. And our clients, yeah, they got in line like they didn't care like they were like, "No, if you think this is best, like no problem here." And we did it. So I would say this has actually been possible for a long time and people do it and so maybe the better question is why don't more people do it? What are we afraid of? Is it because maybe we don't see other peers having success doing the same thing? Is it an attachment to QuickBooks Desktop? I think that's what it was for a really long time. People couldn't get their heads around a cloud accounting platform because they loved desktop so much. Right now, there I would say are plenty of good enough platforms out there that can fully take you off of Intuit. The bigger question is why are more people not doing it? I think it just gets shuffled down the list of priorities. Like we we all want to take this moral stand, but like the business stuff and the commitments that we've made usually come first and so we don't uh you know set aside the time and all that that's going to be required to make it happen. Now recognize everybody listening to this who's not in North America, which is about 50% of the people listening right now, they're like, "What's a QuickBooks?" Like QuickBooks has picked up some traction in Australia, New Zealand, but the rest of the world people are using Xero, Sage products, really the big ones. And so this is a very US, North America specific thing. And I mean I will get as as American screeching eagle as you can, but you know what? Other countries they have to do accounting too. And accounting, double-entry, it's kind of a a universal language. And if QuickBooks has less than 10% of the market share in Australia and the UK, like sure, they're not Americans, but they're still doing accounting, right? Surely those platforms are good enough for us Americans to use, too. All right. Just alienated a lot of people.

Next question. Nice and tight. Canopy versus Karbon. Oh, where to begin? What a great question. We've done uh sponsorships with both of these brands, but that doesn't come into play here, buddy. In fact, we tell our sponsors, uh, if you do sponsorship stuff with us, it will not make us any less likely to, uh, call you out when you do dumb stuff and say like, "Ah, this sucks." Canopy versus Karbon. I would say I they're they're both in my leaders. Like, they're both very, very good platforms. I would say the biggest difference is more ideological between the two. Canopy is very all-in-one. That is kind of their vision is they want to give you as much as possible inside of a single platform. Karbon on the other hand, they are more integrations first. And I think they would also say, "We want to give you as much as possible inside of a platform, but the better way to do that is by having Karbon as sort of the backbone, the spine of your firm, but then integrating with other best-of-breed tools that do more specific jobs." And both of those things are true. And so that would probably be the first thing I would make either the Canopy or the Karbon decision on for you is like, which of those statements feel better for you? Do you really want the all-in-one, recognizing there's going to be some features and some functionality that will be slower to come because you just can't build a really good version of everything into one platform? It takes time. Or are you more like the ecosystem-first person where you want the tool that will integrate with the other really, really good solutions because you want to use the bleeding-edge tech really early and then integrate that back into the core system. Now, in both of those things that I just described, they are not like the the perfect sort of Nirvana situations that that I wish they could be, but that's the biggest difference between those two companies. Otherwise, I mean, I see Karbon getting making a little more headway in the plus 100 employee firm space, and that's largely due to a little more flexibility today and what you can do with the reporting. But that's really just for like multi-hundreds of employee firms. Karbon is more email-centric than Canopy is. In some ways, that's cool. In other ways, it's potentially a blocker if you're bringing a legacy practice into it and you're like and people are like, "I just I can I just use Outlook? I have to use this other email tool." Canopy is laid out in more of a spreadsheet sort of visual, which sometimes is a little more accessible and feels more comfortable uh for accountants. Trade-offs for each. If you're literally down to just those two, you need to test both of them. You also need to talk to other people that use these platforms and be able to ask more targeted questions and be like, "Can you show me how you do X, Y, or Z in your Canopy setup or your Karbon setup?" That is that's gold. The way to make the decision is not just like, you know, me riffing like this for you for 5 minutes. That stuff's super valuable. If you don't have that peer group, obviously my community, we can help you with that. Got over 700 firms in there. We actually run pretty frequent meetups too of firms that are actual users of Canopy and Karbon among other platforms. But that's one of the best things that my community can provide. It's called Realize. I think it's linked down in the show notes, but the website's rlz.io. Probably the thing that I've created of which I am most proud.

Two more questions, by the way. You got questions, fire them on over, big boy. For your software list, how much do your And so this is my app recommendations, which probably the thing I'm I'm best known for now. For your software list. How much do you or your team test the software versus getting feedback from users of the software to build a recommendation list? Doing the same thing for construction industry software and using some message boards for feedback. Okay, interesting. So, this person's doing something similar for the construction industry. Also, where do you go to get user feedback? Realize, Inerson events, etc. Thank you. Great question. How do we build our recommendations? Believe it or not, we do not touch any of these tools to build these recommendations. We're not going in and feature testing this and and comparing all these different things because the reality is there are so many different ways you can get the same job done that I don't think there ultimately is a right answer always for how to do something. The only thing we rely on for our recommendations is what are real users saying because they're the people with the highest quality information. If I set up accounts for each of these platforms and went in and tested them all, what that wouldn't tell me is what about all these fringe use cases that I may not think of and what about what I need to reach out to support and how have they been in like their communication to customers over the last 3 years. Some companies do a good job of this, like changes in policy, changes in integration support. Some companies are really good at how they communicate this stuff, other companies are not. And so 100% of my recommendations are built on what we hear from real users. And that's a combination of I mean the most rich source of that is Realize, my online community. What people are saying in there. Great example, you know, uh I say you use a Thompson Reuters product and you're using their virtual office hosting solution and it's just keeps crap in the bed. It's really slow. What's the best alternative? I mean, you go to Realize, you literally search Thompson Reuters hosting alternative and there's a big old long list of people discussing every single service that you've ever heard of for hosting and that Thompson Reuters product and more that you've never heard of. Those are all real users that have used these platforms for years. You can get all those answers in less than 3 minutes. That is the most rich source of context for how we build our recommendations. But it's also just the conversations I have with people in person at events. And we've had over a thousand people out at our live events last year. I did in total over 70 live events around the world in 2025. And I get, I don't know, maybe 60 to 100 DMs, emails, text messages a day. That's not even counting like people engaging with my content on social media that are sharing thoughts and all that. So, it's just a collection of all that stuff. And so, every brand will like want to send me a demo and be like, "Hey, we'll give you free access if you do XYZ." And I'm like, "I don't care. I don't really care what the brand thinks of their product. What I think or or what I care about is what actual users, accounting firms say about their product. And it's why the people who hate my recommendations most are the people that don't have a lot of real users. They're like, "How are we how do we get in your recommendations?" I'm like, "Build something that people love and are raving fans of." If you have that, you will inevitably be in my recommendations. And I I don't I I honestly don't know there's anyone on the planet that has talked with as many accounting firms in the last three to five years as I have. I can't think of who that would even be. You just think of like all the tendrils we have out there with all the content and and the engagement we get in just so many different ways and like what I'm exposed to. That is probably the most valuable thing I can offer people is just reflecting like what am I hearing from other real users but then also being able to connect those real users because you having the power of being able to go to those other people is tremendously useful to you. That was what I needed when I ran my firm. Like I so many shortcuts would have shaved years off of my firm running journey had I just been able to ask the right people at the right time. So no, it doesn't come from any like testing from us. Sometimes there'll be specific things where I'm like, "How's it doing X, Y, or Z?" And I know users of the platforms that I'll go and ask them, but it is fully from what people are telling me in the wild.

Now, why they're really asking this question is they're building something similar for the construction industry. And this app recommendation list that I have that like, you know, eight or nine thousand accounting firms have downloaded now or something like that. Could you build something like this for your niche? So, we talked about this Liberty Services accounting firm. Could they build an app database for people running these types of companies? 100% man, that could be a great way to get a whole bunch of eyeballs. And my recommendations like they are recommendations. They're not just a list. So if you don't feel confident in saying like what's the right and the wrong stuff to use, don't say that. Like just build the database. In my case, because I have access to so many people, I feel very confident recommending situations where one makes sense and another doesn't. But you don't have to start there. And even my recommendations didn't start there. It was just a roundup of a bunch of tech. And then eventually I was like, "Okay, this tech sucks. I actually see people leaving this tool in droves. I want to tell people don't go and use that tool. Let me save you that headache." But if you're thinking about this for your client base, this could absolutely make sense for you.

Okay, last question here. Hi Jason, hope you're doing well. I'm wondering what recommendations you have for marketing and social media content generation. Do you like Levitate AI or HubSpot? Thank you so much. I can tell you what I use AI for is pulling ideas and concepts out of stuff that I've already made, not for generating net new stuff. I struggle to see a world where AI-generated content ever performs. I mean, two years ago, before the generative AI stuff took off, 4 million videos a day were being uploaded to YouTube. Think about that. 4 million videos a day were being uploaded to YouTube. How many videos does YouTube serve you versus how many are getting uploaded? And so somebody came around and they said, "Hey, because of AI, another two million videos a day are now going to be uploaded to YouTube." How likely is it that those 2 million new AI videos squeeze out the 4 million human videos? Like maybe they squeeze out the bad ones, but the reality is when everybody's using the same tools, how do you stand out, right? Like because at the end of the day, that's what algorithms do is they surface the best of the best and then you never see everything else. And so if you put the same tools in everybody's hands, what wins? What is the differentiator? It's the human on top of the tool. So can you get ahead with better tools? Yes. But there's nothing that is like leaps and bounds ahead to where oh if only you just used this tool, you would be crushing marketing. That like that doesn't exist. It never will because as soon as a tool is that good, everyone else will see it and everyone else will catch up. It's kind of like AI models right now. As soon as somebody makes a big jump, everybody else catches up a couple months later. So I for me, marketing, it's really not about the tech. It's about putting in the repetitions and learning what messaging works and what messaging doesn't. So for the type of person that you're trying to get in front of, the way you learn that is just by doing volume, showing up consistently, having lots of conversations. Like so much of my business is just a volume thing. We're 600 episodes into a podcast. I just told you did 70 live events last year. I personally respond to like so many messages and all this stuff every single day. I wish I had a sexy answer for you here on like here's a great shortcut. The best thing to do is to make the time and space to like really commit yourself to it. And don't try to do too many things at the same time. Don't try to master every single social media platform at a time. Be focused. Like I really think we're capable of focusing on fewer things at a time than we think we can. So be focused really like find what's the right thing to work on right now and just put in a bunch of repetitions. Like that's how you're going to build that marketing skill and create stuff that converts and then the tech stack frankly is is kind of secondary after that because anybody can go out and buy that tech platform but when you build the capability of like connecting with folks that's something that only you have.

Great question gang. Kind of a different format. We're thinking about going to this kind of format of the three chunks like we just did and I would love to hear from you. What did you think of it? So, we kind of start with like a hero chunk up top of some sort of theme that I'm into and then we roast something in the middle theme like tell the story of a real accounting firm and then in the last chunk we get to the mailbag and kind of cover a whole bunch of things. We love to hear what you think of it. Thank you for being here today. Looking smart, looking sharp. New year's treating you well and I'll catch you in the next one.